Notecard Collection: Five

This is what I was talking about last week, Mimi, when I couldn’t let Professor Harris get away with that dismissive look in Religions of the World when you said that the whole Adam-and-Eve story was a cheap and sexist rip-off of an earlier Sumerian story, replete with all the color of paganism. His look said, “bitch,” before he could hide it behind professorial condescension and then that rhythmless over-sixties bald man’s imitation of you-go-girl. Very hip these days in the Ivies. I know you don’t like that I called him a wonky-eyed Freudian who’ll walk around for hours with his pants at his ankles if there’s no one around to pull them up after he shits, but you didn’t have to kick at me when I brought up that his ex-wife had been reading Cixous, H.D. and May Swenson long before she slipped his ring on and disappeared into that patriarchal heart of darkness. After all, I was right, and I convinced myself of it today at Sparky’s café when some wing-tipped linebacker entered with credit-card confidence and that same breakneck blindness that in twenty years will make him the irreducible asshole of the downtown office. He stormed a neighboring table to ask what the bathroom code from their receipt was, but I wished so much he’d turned to ours, to me, that I turned when he erupted with entitlement and answered in look-this-way Russian, “ч Á‰‡ÒÚ‚ÛÂÚ ‚ÂÎËÍËÈ ëÓ‚ÂÚÒÍËÈ ëÓ˛Á!” When he said, “What?” I could see that same high-speed look that would never have time for things like street signs, stoplights, pedestrians, and women drivers. “I’ve got the code here, and I’ll give it to you,” I said, and slapped him on the butt, “if you buy something from the table. How about a nice quarter of buttered bagel?” His “excuse me?” was getting us closer to the point, Mimi, working backwards along the trajectory the Prof’s face had taken. First, you-go-girl in that shade of “you-like-what-you-see-don’t you?” upon the butt slapping; second, a tight-lipped condescension when he found himself on the customer’s side of an antagonistic pretend retail counter; and third, not only that look but also its verbalization, “Don’t be a bitch,” just after my eye-flutter. I turned to the girls simultaneously, because I knew what was coming from that LOOK, and said, “This, ladies, is what I was just getting at: the definition of ‘bitch’ in a patriarchal construct is none other than an epithet for a woman who won’t comply with a man’s desires, no matter how unjustifiable. This wonky-eyed Freudian (forgive me, it’s a knee-jerk, irresponsible epithet, paired uncontrollably with the one currently in question) thinks I’m being unjustifiably rude--though if I had bigger breasts or if I could hide contempt better he might find it flirtatious--and thereby justifies his own rudeness. But he has no idea that I work here, that I clean the bathrooms after closing, and that my giving him today’s restroom code without demanding he follow the rules and purchase something like everybody else, is equivalent to my agreeing to clean up after his ass pro bono. I submit that anyone who offers such service in ignorance is an angel but, when offered with awareness, is none other than this suit’s bitch.”

Notecard Collection: Four

“Ruthie, this must be a first draft that you’ve sent me, and I have to say it just won’t do. It doesn’t communicate any real feeling or emotion. It’s just too bland and straightforward. Some subtlety and imagery will really spruce it up. Like the line where you write, “Dear Family and Friends”—what do you expect to accomplish with something so formal and conventional? It sounds like you’re about to announce that you’ve replaced purple with blue as your favorite color. (True, were you to announce just that, indeed, Dear Family and Friends might be appropriate. But what if you had simply given purple up and made no formal replacement? Just think about that! Or if you chose a favorite color category, like muted earthy spring shades, instead of just a favorite color? I’ll leave the salutation for that scenario open to the gallery.) Given the circumstances that you try to communicate, don’t you think something more personal is appropriate? This salutation is store-bought and gift-wrapped like three-quarters of the salutations out there this time of year. You need something homemade. Try “Dear Gods and Godesses” or “To the Poets and the Readers in the house” or “To the roof beams, all your eyes!” Think how your parents will read the content of the letter that salutes them in this way—“Dear Bloodgivers and Bloodsuckers!” Think of the haste and twist with which their eyes will reflect the letter’s succeeding words. But not these words, Ruthie, here in the first sentence: “I’ve fought and tried, but all I know is guilt and hate, and caution.” I know what you’re saying, I mean I do, because we’ve talked about it before, and I think I’ve been where you are now, at least as far as I dared go in my imagination, and some poetry. But they won’t know. How can they, when the sentence says just what it means without reflecting any of your fading skin color or the droop and surrender of your cheeks? And it doesn’t show where the blood will introduce a new red into the rug nor does it express anything about the tilt of your body on the bathroom linoleum or the purple and blue bulge just above your left eye where your head hit the corner of the sink when you finally collapsed. Try saying things in color, Ruthie, for the sake of the English language and all those who have to read your note before they find your body. Here’s an example that you may have as your own if you want it. “Just before I wrote this note, I opened a can of tuna fish, but not to eat. I just looked at it for two minutes or so before I spooned it into the disposal and threw the can away. The smell is all I wanted, Mom, and the lid, Dad, and, Rob, its sharp edges. I would have taken the garbage out first, Mom, because I did notice it was full, Dad, but, Rob, it was just too heavy. I still went outside, though, as if I had the sack of garbage in my hands, so I had to back the screen door open. No matter what I do that door always scrapes the top of the door jam all the way to ninety degrees. I don’t know how you’ve managed that sound all these years, Mom, or why, Dad, you haven’t yet fixed it, or, Rob, what you did with the five dollars I gave you for your birthday.”

Notecard Collection: Three

“Dear Johnson, do you mind that I call you by your last name? I have nothing against your first. It’s just that your face isn’t made for a first name. You’ve seen it in the mirror, I know. Those eyes are so closely set and that nose so cramped for space that it seems to me it will fall off if you ever cross your eyes. Don’t try it! I like you much too much to see you go through the rest of your life without your nose. And you need your nose now, in these days, what with a wrapper or a box over everything. How wonderful to crash into the odor of freedom every time you liberate a twinkie! But back to your last name. Would you mind terribly if I tried to forget your first name altogether? I don’t know if it’s possible since we’ve known each other now for nearly half a year, but I’ve always wanted to give my memory that ultimate test—a purposeful forgetting, a planned erasure—and I’d like to know a person who only has one name, even if officially you have two. Johnson Johnson Johnson. Repetition is the mother of memory, Johnson. Oksana says that’s a Russian idiom. You can call her Ksusha after I’ve introduced you formerly. Until then, Johnson, don’t cross your eyes!”

Notecard Collection: Two

“The drive home got me thinking about you again. It was the sight of a dead armadillo on the side of the road that did it. Have you ever seen a dead armadillo? I haven’t. Until now I didn’t know they existed. But they do, I’ve seen it. It’s nothing like a live armadillo with its rigid conk-shell roof set evenly against the pull of gravity. The dead one carries this constant slight tilt, like a car with two flat tires on one side. We drove by fast, so I thought it wasn’t dead at all but just moving slowly in the opposite direction, like armadillos do. But it didn’t look up and Dad says it was dead. Didn’t I see the blood? That tilt has stayed with me in my mind, so now I think that gravity isn’t always equally distributed among the dead, that maybe it’s not given evenly to the living either, and it worries me that I’ve never considered this before. I thought you could answer this question because I’ve seen you favor your right leg sometimes for a few seconds after you stand up.”

Notecard Collection: One

She began this collection at age thirteen just after a visit to the Grand Canyon, the family’s first vacation and the principle reason for driving to Arizona. Her first note states that the canyon itself was not visible because of an unexpected snowstorm that filled the whole of what postcards purported to be the largest natural earthly depression in the northern hemisphere with clouds. Though unusually objective prose for a thirteen year old, rereading it just now reminds me that she was rather concerned at the time that the river at the bottom had also been concocted by novelists and imaginative amateur geologists, because she couldn’t see it for the clouds. These are my words, not hers. Hers were less to the point.

“Dear Virginia,” she wrote. “You’d believe this because it’s rare and unbelievable. We drove 750 miles to the Grand Canyon only to learn firsthand that both the adjective and its pretty noun have lost their credibility. Wouldn’t you know it, the whole of the Canyon was stuffed with down! Were I less of a Peter, or if you had been here to extend me your hand, I may have headed off across that big feather bed, found a soft spot in the middle somewhere, covered myself in a layer of snowflakes—because it may as well have been snowing as far as the beguiled weathermen were concerned—and taken a quick nap. But as it turned out, I was in shorts, a young and earnest believer in the words of my parents’ travel book, that the sun over Arizona is as diligent and determined as the Colorado River.”

The Comatose Scenario

I’d lived nearly ten years in a coma when my wife left me and moved back to Cyprus. And it wasn’t a bad life, all things considered, up until that point. I could hear everyone and everything, though I couldn’t respond in any way. No blinking yes/no or anything. No meaningful finger twitches. The weird thing was that people couldn’t tell whether or not I was sleeping, so sometimes when they’d say, “Can you hear me?” or “Dear God, I hope he can hear me, please let him hear me,” I could; and sometimes I was in dreamland and couldn’t. But to them it was all the same.

For the first while I spent a lot of time worrying about this, and then resenting it, as if I were a child being spoken about in the third person by towering adults. Sometimes people did speak directly to me, though, especially this one nurse, Bailey, who cracked me up inside when she’d tell me jokes and who’d ramble on and on as if I’d suggested the most interesting topic with some subtle look.

So I got past the resentment, mostly because I couldn’t hang onto it, and turned my thoughts away from the pointless efforts to signal someone or to raise my head or to communicate that I’d very much like the plug pulled. I mean, I’d still get down on myself, would cry some, always inwardly, but more and more I began to adjust, maybe to accept, and to enjoy myself, if you can imagine. Found that I grinned a lot to myself, and did a lot of thinking. Pretty much caught up on all my thinking.

Also, once a week I’d get a full body massage from one nurse or another, not to mention the more or less regular, though unscheduled, rubbings of various body parts—hand, forearm, calf, thigh—that my wife would give me, at first with affection, later with resignation, finally with resentment. I looked forward to the sponge baths, which were like calculated dog licks, and to the regular shavings, and to being rolled to one and then the other side for the bed changing, and I swear there was a beef bullion cube crushed and added on Sundays to the I.V. drip. Sometime in November, turkey bullion.

People mourned for me. They came and they mourned, except for my little brother, Mickey, who told me stories about home life and the strain my situation put on the family, like how Mom criticized Dad for using a metal spatula on the frying pan and how Dad answered by playing the spatula like a flute and chasing her around the house.

Sometimes during nice weather Mickey would pretend to sneak a cigarette into the hospital room for me. He’d crack a window, light the cigarette, drag a couple of times to get it really smoking, and then put it to my lips, saying, “Suck, buddy, suck.” I could smell the flavor of it, just as part of the mechanism of breathing, pretended I could see how the smoke roiled up, and felt the butt against my lips, which sometimes quivered with the basic joy and relief of the staged moment, the fraternal complicity.

Mickey was very proud of this signal, but who could he tell? It’d be worse that I was smoking, or had smoked prior to the accident, than that my lips quivered. My parents are very concerned about the body and treating it right. They are convinced that if they could only get some supplements or vitamins in me, I’d recover more quickly, and pushed the nurse at least once to replace or supplement the Sunday bullion with a pulverized multi-vitamin. For a while—years, really—Mom gave me surreptitious magnet tests and treatment when she knew the nurses would be absent for a good length of time. “South magnets are for regeneration,” she said and she used masking tape to attach the cold, round apparatuses to my skin over the liver, the spleen and, for good measure, and because you never know, the thyroid, that mystical miniature subterranean pomegranate.

It must be hard on them, to see me trapped inside this body. I wish I could tell them—Mom and Dad and Mickey and Adrian and little Angie, who I’ve never technically met—that it’s not what they think. That it’s not so bad. Contrary to expectations, in fact, I feel freer from my body than I ever did when I had control of it. My body now is a mere incubator for the mind, a shrine built to house the Prophet of higher motivations, dripping in robes of gray matter, enervated with the moving rivers of electrical impulse, a perpetual thunder storm within and around perpetual cloudy skies.

It’s that once you get over the complete loss of control or, rather, the belief that control will return, however gradually, you give up any expectations of your body, which then more or less ceases to exist, especially as the number of physical stimuli becomes minimal and the type becomes mundane. Then, and from then on, you’re all brain, a jiggly king on a throne of bone and blood vessels, the promenade of the body stretched out to greet visitors.

Until one fine day you wake up. Both from sleep and from the coma, simultaneously. It’s weird, because like in the movies, the timing makes it seem as if you’ve only had a long, dreary dream, and that feels cliché. But if it’s true that you really spent nearly ten years in a coma—and you know there are people like this in real life—you don’t want your first thought upon awakening to feel cliché. It ought to be dramatic. I mean, there ought to be drama.

So you look around, squinty-eyed against the mild light of pre-dawn. But there’s no one there. No one to see you wake up, to witness the landmark. You feel like you’ve awakened off cue, just before the alarm clock. Now there’s both the cliché to manage and the sense that you were cheated of sleep. You’re left only with more time to think, and that seems natural enough. Familiar. Much more familiar than looking around the room, which is still too dim anyway. Or than working the eyelids up and down, for fun or practice. Or than testing just how far the consciousness might extend, to the finger? The toe? Is it propitious, this absence of audience? This stage and its props and the closed eyes of the stage lights for one first and one last dress rehearsal?

(Maybe you are still asleep? Have you never dreamt of awakening from the coma in ten years of perpetual dreaming? Has your mind never cheated you, with some farcical, pointless dimness and the absurd absence of the loving, grieving, fitfully sleeping wife—the sweat on her forehead and the clenched teeth as evidence of that fitfulness—of the dramatic awakening you’ve earned after ten wasted years in bed and the wasted body as evidence?)

You close your eyes again, the lids like an old door on its creaky hinges. You believe that you’ve been in a coma for nearly ten years because you must believe it, but also because there is just too much information in your memory of the days of visitors, of the pungent news people, of the lamentations that gave way to the shouts between doctors and family, then to the unwelcome first-name familiarity, the absent-minded nods-hello from the nurses; the deluge of flowers and cards and people who you knew well and less well, and then the dry heat of the sun and the remnant trickle of visits from those who felt mostly obligated, sometimes sentimental or nostalgic, less and less hopeful. And there were all the conversations about politics and sports and religion—a lot of religion—and things related to your condition and gossip about the conditions of neighboring patients and aren’t we blessed, in contrast, and some small talk and some angry fits, often directed at your limp and pitiful body, with harmless wads of paper thrown like a desperate lobbed tennis ball, and some really touching moments, usually at night, usually one-on-one, the lullaby in the stringy voice of a strange child, an active hand gripping your mannequin’s hand and a voice, as if from a movie, overhead, low, spoken more and more to oneself, the sentiment expressed with less and less frequency, “Mark, you don’t know how hard this is on me,” or “on Angie, the poor baby needs her father,” or “on your mother, you should see how she’s wrinkled,” or “on Mickey, he’s dropped out of college again,” or “on me, I don’t think I can do this anymore,” or “on Angie, she’s almost ten now, you know, she needs a father, I’m really doing this for her.” “This” was leaving me to go back to Cyprus, where her family lives, and taking Angie, my little American Angie, with her. To turn her into a tanned Greek-gabbing olive that I won’t recognize!

How do you respond to that? It’s true, you were speechless.

My head must have been connected to some head monitor, I imagine, with the dot-matrix printer and the sheaves of paper racing to keep up with the earthquake of peaks and canyons and the melting of the polar ice caps and the jumping of sinister icicles, all created by the inimitable, discrete act of opening and shutting the eyelids, because a doctor entered minutes later and reintroduced me to the cold glow of light from the hospital corridor, then from the overhead fluorescents, from the rude awakening and the cold pressure of his thumbs and fingers first on the right eye then on the left, then from the pen light.

“Good morning, Mr. Novak.”

He would say something like that, predictable and appropriate. Was there no hint of irony in any of this? Was I to be robbed entirely of my entrance? My eyes were still closed, the light really was garish, and so I couldn’t see whether the doctor wore an ironic grin or not. In the course of his career, he’d probably welcomed enough comatose people back to consciousness to dilute the significance of this one time. Besides being a professional. Besides having his own problems. Maybe a swollen prostate. Hangnails. Halitosis.

“You’re wondering where you are, I suppose, but first things first, Mr. Novak. Some tests, take you off that respirator for one, that tube must chafe a bit.” And there it was, a tube in my mouth, plumbing my throat, making me gag, the sudden recognition of it as of my hand when the doctor pierced the back of it for blood, mine for as long as I can remember.

And then Bailey was back, and the light was very strong in the room, but this time from the window, the shades now drawn, maybe for the first time with purpose, and consciousness was flooding into me and into the inert body with the force of wind and rivers and the stored memory of a thousand aches. The body awash with a fiery tingling and the sounds of fear and alarm heard anywhere the minds of individuals are threatened by their hearts.

There were two other nurses beside and behind Bailey, and they were whispering as if at mass or in the prelude to some famous, televised putt, here to see the waking man. I did not recognize their voices, but I knew Bailey’s, which now seemed displaced and echoy inside her full face and her big nose, as if it did not belong to her, this woman cast in the role of nurse Bailey for the adaptation of my life, first put down in a lifeless novel, to film.

“And how is the star of the day?” she said in an awkwardness befitting cue cards or an audition. I blinked to suggest recognition, the smile in my face still sunk in memory, and she nodded without keeping her eyes on me, feeling perhaps in the same moment the same disappointment in my animation that I’d felt in the embodiment of her voice.

She fiddled with a few knobs on the elaborate system of monitors and machines—my heart, my lungs, apparently—and then turned to go, motioning with two palms for the two groupies, with their agonizing looks of wonder that could just as easily have been let-down, to exit. As Bailey leaned back in for the door handle, with her head in the room and her body already out, she said, “Mr. Novak, your mother called this afternoon upon hearing the good news. She asked me to tell you, just because no doubt you’re wondering about all this and what’s transpired and all, that your wife and child made it safely to Cyprus.”

Not a dream, then.

“Oh,” said Bailey, just before she latched the door, so that only between my eyes and only her eyes and the cavern and darkness of her mouth was there this transmission. “You may also be happy to know that your wife was here when you woke up yesterday morning. She had been asleep in the guest room of the hospital. But she didn’t get a chance to say good bye before she left because you had fallen asleep again and, bless her heart, she didn’t want to wake you.”

Then the door latched and the silence of sleep returned to the hospital room, minus some chirping outside the window and the strange sound of your own breathing. And though you can’t think out loud yet, you find somewhere inside you the memory of a smile, make a wry one, the first of many future wry smiles. But for the life of you, you can’t get your eyelids to shut again.

Kitchenette

We made a long list of what we imagined she did all day in that kitchen.

And then we numbered the list and found that it wasn’t as long as it had looked before: only six items.

It was difficult, we decided, to make a substantial list when our information was so limited, based only on the static picture of a woman across the street staring at a computer, staring without ever looking out of her window.

Her large, arched, flamboyant fourth-floor picture window.

The first thing on our list was “receptionist,” which was too bland, so we added “at an abortion clinic,” which was cheap, so we added, “for women who’ve already had a bunch of kids, at least five.”

It took us a while to get to number two on the list, because we really took to playing out abortion scenarios, like the one where the evangelical Christian mother of seven comes in pregnant with conjoined twins, who the Lord has sent to test the resolve of his faithful servant . . . Jobina . . . and says, in justification of her visit, “How we get where we’re going is much less important than getting there, after all, isn’t it?” She had ropes of scars where her belly had been.

Number two on the list was the result of a pendulum swing in our thinking: “Public Relations Specialist, Vatican City, New York City branch.” Such a position would explain her focus and commitment. She could not afford to look out of her window or dilly-dally about her work, which was sacred. And what pressure, to have God always just over your shoulder! Polly asked, “What does she do?” and Allen answered, “She writes epigrams and Catholic jokes.” Like, The Pope Saves, and, Save it for the Pope, and, If the Pope Shits in a Forest and The Pope Is No Dope.

Next on the list was “Keen, Hip Dramatist” a la Carrie Bradshaw from Sex in the City, except for the keen dramatist part, and though we couldn’t verify her hipness, it was clear enough from the way she chicken-pecked the keyboard that she concerned herself very little with the mundane minutiae of life and/or that she must be protecting an expensive and ostentatious, but artful, manicure. She was intent, and sponsored: she had an NEA grant and a rich, soulful lover, who was a closeted member of the literati, displaced from birth as an oilman in the Midwest. She was, at the moment of list-making, writing the second act, second scene of a stage play, bound to be gripping and achy, called Pinocchio Gets a Nose Job, Beverly Hills Style, in which our protagonist, after his longish nose initiates an unsightly champagne spill at Perez Hilton’s invitation-only New Year’s 2005 Rock-It-Like-A-Super-Rockette party, asks his bff, Jiminy (later to become principal foil in the wake of raucous jealousy, the nose will look THAT good), to lend him the price, out of his goddamn trust fund, of a nose job. While he’s at it, besides making it shorter, seemlier, chic, the doctor will coat the new nose in platinum for protection and paint a miniature, but deft, pirate ship floating just off the coast of his left nostril.

The fourth item on the list was “Guinness Book of World Records Record Contender” for the uncontested record of "kitchen sitting.” Of sitting in one’s kitchen,” said Pritchard, so Benny, who was scribe, wrote, “for being as boring as a metronome,” on another piece of paper, which, after a brief struggle, he safety-pinned to the front of Pritchard’s t-shirt, just over the little alligator logo. Polly thought, out loud, “To win a record like that, she’d have to have a pretty harsh posterior.” And we moved on.

Fifth—“Online Gambling Genius or Junkie, Depending on the Day’s Luck”—was our creative low-point, but it seemed a good round number to strive for and it led finally to number six, our favorite.

(6)—we didn’t know how to call this one, so we set to describing it—“She works for a telephone company, maybe AT&T, phoning people who’ve not used their phone service for over a year, and if they pick up, she says, ‘This is a public service announcement from your phone company: The cost of local phone service does not increase with use, so please feel free to make as many local phone calls as you’d like. Please do keep in mind that long-distance phone calls are charged per minute, so please feel free to make as many long-distance phone calls as you think you can afford. Thank you.’”

This is what she does all day alone in that kitchen at her computer. Grappling with the disconnected of America.

Once, when someone said something other than, “thank you,” after her spiel, the woman in the kitchen glanced out of her window. For the first time ever.

“What did the person on the other line say to make her look out the window?” asked Polly.
Benny answered: “It was a woman with a breezy voice and a cool manner, which is why the urgency in it sent chills down the kitchen sitter’s spine.”

“But what did she say?” said Polly, in an uncool manner.

“She said, after a pause, ‘And how much would it cost, per minute, for me to shove this receiver up your ass?’”

“She did not!” said Polly, still uncool.

“Okay, fine, what did she say then?” said Benny, losing his cool.

“She said, ‘Cookies will be ready in ten minutes, child.’”

“That’s stupid,” said Pritchard. “No grandmother has a breezy voice. They all have voices that are strained through cheese graters. She said, and I have this on very good authority, ‘I’ve been a selfish being all my life.’”

“Nerd,” I said. “Haven’t you missed your appointment for tea with Darcy and gang? She said none of those things. The woman on the other end actually said nothing. The woman in the kitchenette heard a gunshot, which she thought came from the street below, and the shivers down the spine, they came from the eerie feeling she got from the sound of the other receiver falling to the floor.”

And now, when we stare out of our fourth floor window at the woman in the building across the street—any building, any street—we each, in our own little, passing way, feel bad for her.

A Pen Pal Monologue

He recalls sending Pearl for milk and, when she brought back only water, cursing her for her indolence. She’d say, “It’s on account of me lame foot,” and he’d say, “Cut it out with the ridiculous accent and boil the damn stuff for tea.” Here they were playing this game again, he bilious, she flippant, as if they didn’t like each other, as if they’d been forced by exigency to marry, as if the identity of one weren’t inextricable from that of the other.

As if one would continue to live once the other had died.

When Pearl passed away, Leonard continued to live, but it was only by a small margin that he managed it, because for some time afterward he felt the greatest sensation upon awakening that he had not breathed a single breath all night, and so had to swing his legs over the bed and struggle for air with his head in one hand and his chest in the other, his heart in his throat, and the tears in his eyes mixing agony with asphyxia, until at last he’d remember the state of things, and then his heart would sink, allowing his throat to open and his lungs, beleaguered, to sag and pout with the weight of air.

So morning after morning Leonard was left to fetch his own milk, until he couldn’t, and boil his own water and lay his own tea for a table that had been much too small for two, now much too large for one. He was sentimental about it by not being sentimental about it. He would say, “She was a polecat, a waster, a real hussy,” and in this way he continued the game that they’d kept up for these last few decades.

This went on unperturbed for a handful of years and, when Leonard had ceased all contact with the outside world, except for the daily visits from the housekeeper, Colleen, a stolid woman of forty whose face already sat and hung like bark, he began to invent other characters besides Pearl, most based loosely or closely on people from his past, and thus he populated a lonely world with a palatable but not uninteresting milieu of acquaintances and events.

This precipitated an unnoticed change from speaking of people in the past tense and the third person to speaking of them and to them as if they were present, so that at his morning tea, for example, Leonard would say to Pearl, “You are a polecat, a real waster, a hussy,” and pour the steaming tea for two.

And in this way Leonard survived the death of his wife, who for thirty-six years had been to him like oxygen, essential but mostly unnoticed, warm, and at times thrilling; who, when gone, had become the most tangible thing in his world, thick, pasty, grotesque, like a daily dose of cod-liver oil; and who, once returned, in consequence of her brief absence, became all the world to him and an accomplice in the savagery of his dementia.

It never consciously occurred to Leonard that in resurrecting Pearl in his mind, she’d resurrected him in spirit. Though his body continued to waste away, his will to live grew sharper through the wit and vivacity of his conversation with Pearl and the distinguished guests they invited to tea.

Pearl had changed to a degree after her death, too, so that she no longer eschewed the monotonous tasks of entertaining guests, which inevitably fell to her (while of course the doctor was busy reading). Now she rather enjoyed putting the leaves in the table or arranging a new vase of flowers from the garden for the centerpiece. She even began ordering white porcelain teacups by mail and decorating them with bright little scenes from her childhood in the Alps: first a series of thatched-roof cottages, then a stand of Aspens lined with grass and wildflowers, then a smudgy little duo holding hands on one cup, marrying under a canopy on another, seen through a candle-lit window from outside their cottage on the third, and on the fourth, which made Pearl chuckle with the irony of it, pushing up timid, but cheerful, daisies.

Leonard and Pearl began entertaining friends from the local community whom they’d known for some time. They were no classists, but they ensured to invite only the respectable as they, too, were respectable: the one a doctor, the other a matron of sorts to the town, of unsung but multiple talents, including painting, as mentioned, and with the kind of humor that undoes and softens the most querulous, the most taciturn.

It was not long, though, before the renown of their little gatherings began to spread, and soon enough their invitations gave way to numerous requests from acquaintances and strangers alike to call on the couple at its earliest convenience.

Among these was the distinguished Dr. Helen Middleton, whose research in the field of nuclear power and its dangers was heralded by liberals and conservatives alike. Leonard, himself an emeritus professor of mathematics at Kings College, Cambridge, having wide interests had read her books once or twice and, though he found her tone too alarmist to be credible, respected her work nonetheless and liked her face (as seen from the inside flap of the dust jacket), with its none-too-aquiline nose, which suggested a congenial, if slightly tragic, worldview. It was based on these factors that, after consulting with his wife, he accepted her request to come to tea.

She brought Kip, her poodle, and WaWa, her mini-schnauzer, because she could not find a sitter. Her relationship with Kip and WaWa was such that she could not leave them home alone, not for their sakes, though, but for her own. This tickled Leonard no end; he felt superior in his independence. And when they settled in at her feet under the table, droopy and nonplussed by the drudgery of human social life, this hardly being their first errand or appointment of the day, he nudged them several times with his sock for even the smallest reaction, which is all he got from either of them.

Ms. Middleton introduced and excused her dogs with one practiced sentence: “Professor and Mrs. Williams, this is Kip and WaWa Middleton, your smallest biggest fans.” And then she swooped into the chair indicated and just slouched slightly, as if ambivalent about where she’d rather be, among her hosts or nuzzled on the ground with the dogs.

Unlike most of their conversations, Pearl led this one, owing in part, perhaps, to the fact of a shared alma mater and to the compliment that Ms. Middleton had paid Pearl’s teacups. She’d said, “What fine coloring, but it’s the drama of the scene, here with the couple sipping tea through the lighted window, caught forever in mid-sentence or mid-gaze, not unlike the poor, intrepid lovers of Keats’s Grecian urn.” She lacked no flair for drama.

And from this point onward during their brief and only engagement, Leonard said very few words, except to comment on some point of history he felt the younger doctor had misconstrued or misapplied, and so the conversation tended away from Ms. Middleton’s research, which was Leonard’s key interest in her visit, to follow a more personal vein.

Pearl said, “The grass of the quadrangle was terribly green and lush. One could hardly resist sitting on it.” They were comparing their experiences at University.

“One was hardly allowed any privilege but that, as a woman,” said Ms. Middleton. “It is unfortunate that there were not shelves of books upon the grass—or instead of it. That would have expanded the women’s library by half at least.” Her accent was very clean and her diction untrammeled. She was in no hurry to prove herself, and this confidence, or languor, along with the feminist conversation festering on the table, irked Leonard so that he jabbed at, instead of nudging, little Kip in the collar.

Kip yelped, but blandly, for the kick with all its vehemence was mild, being attached to an old foot, and Dr. Middleton was unconcerned. For being so infinitely tied to her animals, she hardly noticed them at all. It seemed they were so familiar to Ms. Middleton as to be transparent, like a rock pile, and with that thought Leonard himself forgot them and turned his mind fully back to the conversation, which still festered in minutiae.

Pearl was describing an encounter with a teacher of English literature and Latin, which had taken place upon the lush grass of the quadrangle at the woman’s college. “He wasn’t handsome, to be sure, but something in his air enchanted me. He floated when he walked, did he not?”

“It’s true, he was a heavenly sight, even fifteen years afterward,” said Ms. Middleton. “I thought for sure he’d been married, at least once.”

“Of course, we all did, and at the same time we all hoped he wasn’t, and shied away from his eyes and demurred when he asked us questions. It was all rot, of course, the way we acted, and not a few of us resolved in hindsight that he was the ruin of us as a gender, bringing out as he did all of the stupid, latent fawning that we practiced only under social duress.”

“You might be surprised,” said Ms. Middleton, “that conditions remained altogether unaltered for my generation as well. Wouldn’t you believe it? The man was just shy of fifty and still managed to wrangle the silly and inept out of the brightest student. They say, though, that his end was scandalous.”

“I had heard tell something of disgrace,” said Pearl, who looked away in delight or distress.

“Of course nothing was concluded satisfactorily, and the whole sordid thing, whether true or not, implicated the poor man in a scenario that not even his accomplishments, to say nothing of his grand charm, could contain. I cannot say I know the details of his dismissal, it having occurred some time after my graduation.”

“I do hate to gossip,” said Pearl. She poured everyone more tea and took another cookie. Leonard spied her profile, hoping she’d insist on the narrative. But she did not have to. Helen pushed the tea from her as if making to go and sat up straight in her chair. Kip and WaWa opened their eyes on cue but remained prostrate and languid, familiar with the narrow difference between their mistress’s intentions to exit and her intentions to speak.

“I say this in the strictest of confidences,” she began, though there was only intrigue and nothing of hesitance in her voice. “I may not know of the final affair, but I have had an inkling of the man’s hidden character, which may have led to his demise.” There was no eerie silence, the kind that usually followed such introductions, thanks to the frenetic crunch of a cookie in Pearl’s mouth and a syncopated belch from Leonard that went willfully unnoticed. But the audience was rapt all the same, and Ms. Middleton continued. “After a paper of mine on Milton placed first in the annual essay competition, Professor Wasserman invited me to luncheon as a gesture of congratulations. I was, of course, unnerved and the envy of all the girls. This was not just a move to treat me—a woman and a student—as an equal, albeit a young and untested one, but also a devilish, contemptible snub of university decorum. It was marvelous, and I dressed as best I could for it.”

The clock struck some hour. WaWa raised his head and blinked.

“I arrived on time wearing this muslin thing that wasn’t at all pretty, but clean, pressed and the best I had. I wore heels and lipstick, and I had a girlfriend put my hair up to show my neck off to advantage, but my nerves were so taut that I sweat like a pig and reddened like an apple. I arrived just shy of the hour appointed and knocked. Wasserman lived in a heavy-set building with columns that were either stately or intimidating, not both, and a stoop to outdo the ostentation of Buckingham Palace itself. But it had a silly little fern that hung about as if embarrassed, and it was while my attention was drawn to it, with my back to the door, that he answered.

“He invited me in, and as I crossed the threshold I stepped into the heavy smell of unwashed linen. The dust was oppressive and the light through the window of the drawing room hung upon it. Time seemed to hang, too, and no words passed between us. It was as if there were a tacit understanding of my presence, but it was namely that sensation which perplexed me.”

“Well he must have spoken! He ought to have said something, oughtn’t he? He was always unfailingly dexterous with words!” said Pearl.

Leonard hmphed, but it was a sound intended to discourage interruptions, not to pass judgment. In the painting of this man he saw something of himself or, rather, something of what he wished he’d been: more of the romantic, less of the choleric. He had been in situations before that weren’t unromantic, but they certainly weren’t sublime, nothing to inspire an avid retelling decades later. Leonard had always navigated life with words—the bigger the better—but here, this man, he put down things in silence and was the more powerful for it.

And even now, in the retelling, Wasserman’s silence changed the room. None but the dogs remained unmoved. Leonard saw that Pearl was as eager as she’d ever been about stirring in her sugar cube—and there, another cube! Light from the afternoon sun made the crystals of the overhead chandelier glow, and when Leonard glanced at Ms. Middleton he noted that the bags under her eyes suggested depth, not age, as he’d thought before, and that her eyebrows were uncommonly stout. She was lean, but not too lean, and articulate without fear of the inarticulate, or the sanguine, or the unclean.

Leonard was struck with the urge to smoke a cigar. If only he’d smoked cigars! He had a rather heavy dinner jacket. He thought of retrieving it, without inventing an excuse for fetching it, knowing he never would. Instead, he took another sugar cube himself.

Ms. Middleton continued, though not before Pearl hurried to refill her cup. Pearl was anxious, and she found relief in busying her hands. She retrieved a third round of cookies for herself and her husband.

“It was I who finally spoke,” and out came a long breath. “It seemed an age that we stood in the entry, with the grimy walls and the old, dark pictures. The weight of the room oppressed me, mixed with the silence, so I moved through to the parlor, across from the drawing room, to comment on a rather classic reading chair, not high-backed, but covered in a rich burgundy. It seemed somehow resistant to the dust that accumulated everywhere else and, once I invoked it, Wasserman invited me to sit and, once I’d sat, paced the floor and began in earnest.

“He said, ‘I invite few people here. I know it is uncivil, but I am not all poppy and poetry. I must close like any flower.’ His face was dark, despite the haze of sunlight, and he did not take my eyes. He brooded, and it was obvious he meant to tell me something that weighed upon him. At any rate, I expected something dramatic and, to be frank, I hoped for it, for at least that would be more in keeping with his character than this initial taciturnity. But he continued in an even monotone, while still pacing: ‘I am to be divested of a rather valuable estate, and though I am not undone, justice be damned, I need a favor to help me weather the disappointment. You have earned the right to an invitation here because of your mind, which I find complex enough to manage surprises, but I invited you here for your face. Please don't go. (I had moved to rise.) Please stay. I ask for nothing more unseemly than your presence at a bachelor’s house and your statuesque bearing, for I am to ask you to sit for me.’”

“He was a painter!” said Leonard, and at the outburst the three of them jumped at once. Leonard nudged Kip again, but inadvertently. He was astounded by the portrait of this man, the very portrait of his own ideal self: charming, handsome, literate, loved, bright in the eyes, but with eyes that hid a secret calling and a melancholic fear—no, knowledge!—that mediocrity and, worse, obscurity, threatened him at every side, least of all from the fading and taming that comes of age, and thus that one’s true passion ought to be hidden from the prying and inane eyes of the public lest it be misunderstood!

Ms. Middleton continued. “‘I am not a painter,’ he said to me, ‘but I am a student of painting, and when I see that shadows are not black but colored it pains me that others do not see it also. You convinced me, when you wrote of Paradise Lost that there was nothing about paradise to mourn but the fact of loss itself, to hope against hope that here, finally, I'd found someone who would not see value in the thing but rather value in the seeing of the thing; that the difference between love and lust is nothing more than the length of time the lover takes to look upon the beloved; that when Wordsworth talked of poetry he talked of something superior to its object but secondary, if that, to the act of contemplating the object. There is no other type of person worth painting and no other type of person willing to be painted.'”

Leonard felt himself sweat. Pearl stood to draw the blinds. The dogs shifted and stretched. Ms. Middleton concluded. “Of course I refused him.”

Pearl spun around to gawk at her, but mumbled, “Of course,” and lowered her eyes. Leonard choked on his tea; he only just managed to contain it in his mouth. Ms. Middleton sat back. She looked older now. There was a preoccupation in her eyes. She was as swept up in her narrative as her audience, only it was entranced by disbelief while she was caught up by regret.

Pearl sat. She yearned to ask why Ms. Middleton had refused Wasserman, but she demurred. Leonard nearly asked for them both, but restrained himself. While Pearl bowed to decorum, Leonard worshiped subtlety for its part in the makeup of the sublime, which also informed his interest in the story, and so he dared not tarnish the inconclusive with a request for more detail. There was, therefore, little left to say, and the party shortly broke up.

* * *

Some months afterward Leonard penned a letter to Ms. Middleton and posted it to her publisher in New York City. He assumed a collegiate air, which seemed appropriate to their profession, and an objective tone that fit his purpose. He rewrote it several times to achieve the allusion of spontaneity and the brevity befitting the indifference of a happily married man.

Dear Dr. Middleton,

It was a charm and a pleasure to make your acquaintance this spring over tea. Pearl and I feel it an honor to have you to tea again when next you’re in the country. In fact, Pearl insists upon it and has begun to pester me about getting a dog or two. She will be pleased to know that your travels were not too taxing and that you’ve now comfortably settled among your own familiar things. It does upset her that people go to such lengths to travel such distances simply to find their home, which (she hastens to say and says it often) is of course all the time in one’s own backyard. You will write when you can, perhaps between one class and the next, to alleviate my darling’s anxiety.

Yours cordially,

Dr. Leonard Williams

Of course at the heart of the letter was an indecent curiosity, but there was also something of the awe, inspired by Ms Middleton’s depiction of Wasserman’s dramatic persona and its obvious influence, of the romantic sublime.

And now, when Pearl went out, Leonard asked of her not only the milk and water, but also a pack of cigars, the cheaper the better. When she was out, and increasingly when she was home, too, he settled in the parlor, which he refused to have dusted, closed the drapes (or had Colleen close them) and took to wearing his dinner jacket.

The jacket was made of wool but, while technically white, it bore an artful grayness not unlike the silver in the hair of slender men with fine posture. He’d actually gotten married in it, lacking the means or the ostentation for a bona fide tuxedo, but he’d given up wearing it—had actually forgotten about it—around the time he’d given up society altogether, just prior to retirement. It made things awfully hot in the summertime and not quite warm enough in the winter (Leonard’s pension was robust enough to keep him in coal), but in the spring and in the autumn it was matchless, and the feeling that, finally, he was tapping something of the poet in himself, or of the dormant painter, after these years of pragmatic self-sacrifice, was worth any discomfort.

True, Pearl did not like it, all of it being quite uncharacteristic of Leonard, and their plans for tea and the tea parties themselves suffered from his moods, which he shifted unpredictably as required by the romantic ethos. But his relationship with Pearl did not suffer any serious setbacks. Besides, Pearl was not jealous by nature. And, after all, she was the wife, while Ms. Middleton was nothing but a passing fancy, a mere acquaintance—and one miles away at that—with whom Leonard shared a degree of professional intimacy, and in whom Leonard had nothing but an academic interest. She was like any colleague, and his pursuit of her via post was nothing more than his own well-groomed pursuit of knowledge.

As the purveyor of the romantic hero, Dr. Middleton held important information for Leonard, and so he sought the narrator of the brief, but epic tale of Dr. Wasserman, which grew, the more Leonard reviewed it in his mind, in passion, sensuality, sublime irreconcilability and, what’s more, personal significance. It was as if Ms. Middleton had been speaking solely to him, her body taut in the chair, and for his benefit alone.

In light of these facts, he expected soon to receive a letter from Ms. Middleton and then, in his own response, to call Ms. Middleton by her given name, but when he received no reply to his first letter, despite remarkable patience, he penned another, this one less measured, less staid, with a touch of the poetic that she’d awakened in him, and posted it a year to the day of the previous.

Dear Dr. Middleton,

It has been some time since your last visit, but the counting of what’s past hardly stands to the counting of the time that remains to elapse until the rap of your knuckles at the door, your elaborate entrance, and the sound of your light but significant steps on the linoleum.

I am reassured by the vehemence of the blossoms on the cherry tree that, if you make your trip soon, you will be greeted with more than mere tea and cookies.

You will also find the host somewhat changed, if not his house, and your reception, I rush to assure you, will not fail to remind of another occasion, when other, earlier cherry trees were in bloom and the romance of the quadrangle at Oxford was not just a radiant memory.

And though you, my dear professor, I hardly count as a simple radiant memory, I hold that memory close to me and its radiance warms my heart. You will come soon, and if you will not come soon, you will write soon, and if you will not write soon, then I will.

With gratitude and a measure of impatience, your,

Dr. Leonard Williams

P.S. Pearl sends her love, too.

In the interim between the posting of the letter and its receipt, between the receipt of the letter and its reading, between its reading and its rereading, between its rereading and its answer, and between its answer and the speedy fulfillment of its request, Leonard reread Dr. Middleton’s books. She was not uninspired, he decided. Moving, even, and what before had seemed dowdy or urbane in its politicism now felt vivacious and poignant, though not without a proper dose of professional restraint. There was passion in these words, and Leonard read them more and more as if they were written to him. In lieu of the letter that did not come, these words turned into the personal expressions of an untamed spirit and the lava of its sensual heart.

He had always wondered how activists did it: from what source they derived their dogged insistence, their sense of social responsibility, and their vehemence, which to Leonard had always seemed so vulgar. Before, there had always been an order to life, and this order and the routine that attended this order had always soothed Leonard. Now it irked him, and he found that even Pearl, not without a measure of gaiety herself, was altogether too industrious and predictable.

It was in this altered state of mind that Leonard, moved by a passion better suited to the impetuosity of youth and by the inexplicable neglect of Dr. Middleton in her role as pen pal, began to invent facts that he thought might induce a response from the object of his desire. No sooner did he invent them, however, then he began to believe them.

He wrote of his mother, long dead, as if she were spending an unexpected renaissance of thought in a small room on the French Riviera. He dared not write that she was putting out the best poetry of her life—he feared that he’d fail to create poetry fine enough to corroborate his claim—but he gave no thought to ascribing to her mind great gifts of intellect, including a prescience not unlike that of Cassandra, the cursed oracle of Greece. He would not be surprised to find, he wrote, that she’d simply disappeared one day, having lighted upon a cloud or something and floated up to heaven.

He wrote also of the States and how, having now studied their history at some length, he’d lost some of his previous, but understandable, prejudice of them and was thinking, though of course with appropriate reserve and pragmatism, of making a visit. Perhaps, he wrote, he might call on the lady in upstate New York, where she purportedly lived, or somewhere more suitable to both parties, assuming her consent.

He was, of a truth, a great lover of classical music, thinking anything other a cheap trick, and found at once an expression of his passion and solace for its inertia in the performance of Arthur Rubinstein on the piano. There was nothing, he insisted in his letters, like Chopin’s nocturnes, and again nothing like Chopin’s nocturnes under the consummate and delicate care of Rubinstein’s genius.

Another year passed and still no reply. Leonard was getting on in age and Pearl, whose first death had marked her for life, despite a temporary influx of domestic energy, began to flag in her responsibilities, so that the tea was served tepid and the cookies turned stale more often than not before they could be eaten, and the pictures on the teacups lost their quaintness to the dullness of time and the dimness of Leonard’s eyes. As Pearl began to wilt, however, so Helen bloomed, and the bags under her eyes, whatever they had seemed to Leonard before, disappeared altogether, as also did the gray of her hair and the sulfur, however faint, of her breath.

He wore nothing now but his dinner jacket, threadbare and stained, a shabby pair of trousers and a pair of indiscernible slippers, even to bed, and he took very little time to do anything, for he had none; it was all reserved for Helen Middleton and the letters he wrote her, some passionate, some vehement, some imploring, and some still incredulous. How can it be, he wrote, that between you and me could have passed something as real as this and yet so much time since that meeting has passed? I dare not think that dear Dr. Wasserman miscalculated his estimation of your mind and of your body. Surely, he did not, for I have witnessed them myself, and if I could (and yet I might!) I, too, would ask you to sit for me, and I would turn your patience into the vigor and meaning of life itself. To that end I have sent Colleen for pencils and paper. I now only lack a sharpener.

* * *

It was in the spring of a year not now long passed that Leonard fell and, failing to get up, acquiesced. Pearl had recently passed away again, and, with the unbroken silence of Dr. Middleton, Leonard felt his loss doubly. It was, after all, more than he could bear, and he decided that if his time had finally come to die, death hadn’t chosen such a terrible moment. Pearl and he had not received requests to tea in some months now—maybe years—and Leonard was aware, though vaguely, that to begin making invitations in earnest as in the past would prove difficult, all but one of the teacups—the one of the couple holding hands—having fallen from his trembling hands at one time or another and shattered.

So he resigned himself to death, though he feared it. There was, at least, something romantic in the mystery that lay beyond mortality and something sublime in the silence that, if anything, must define death. And so Leonard was reconciled.

And so he lay there, maybe minutes, maybe years, but his heart, beating with a fury as if to sprint to the finish line, remained unsatisfied. It had loved and lost and loved again, and the joke had been in the effort, not the object, of that last love. Leonard had suffered from his passion and suffered from its unfulfillment, and now, prostrate on the floor not far from where Kip and WaWa had lounged unaffected and bored, he suffered from the cruel faces on the cards that fate had played him, a man already in his dotage.

Indeed, fate had played him.

It had flaunted the specter of sublimity before him in the visage of the charming, brooding Dr. Wasserman and had taunted him with the prospect of taking for his muse a woman as contradictory and distinct as the prim and florid Dr. Middleton. He had written poetry—strict Shakespearean sonnets—to the object of his love, which he yearned to send, but he found that he could no more write poetry than he could overcome the prosaic of his own life, no matter his intent or the power and length of his concentration.

And so when death came, after this eternity of contemplation and a thorough soaking of Leonard in the cold of the linoleum and a mixture of his own sweat and urine, it came calmly, unperturbed and unnoticed, in the night to cheat Leonard of the sublime agony of a painful death. And thus Leonard slipped away, disappointed in his last hope to experience a romantic moment.

Colleen arranged for the wake and the flowers, spent a good deal on a procession of big empty black cars to follow the hearse (reasoning that the dead man would think it stately) and tidied up the house before shutting it down for auction. She found, as she swept and cleaned, a pile of paper-clipped note cards stuffed between couch and couch cushion. She hardly bothered to glance at it, but noted the salutation, “Dear Dr. Middleton,” and a fairly recent date, and so she posted it to the familiar address of the publisher in New York City. It read, with something of the spirit that marks the poetic,

I wrote to you several years ago at your Christian community in N.Y. State, but you never wrote back to me. I wrote again and I might have been too strident, emphasizing your weak points. If I hurt your feelings I am sorry.

Mommy is dying of ovarian cancer. She is 95. (As old as Arthur Rubinstein!)

The energy program which you outline (no air conditioners . . .), is perhaps a bit severe. Perhaps I might argue, as in ordering Chinese food in the past, Can I have one item from column A, and one item from column B?

I do writing therapy: about every other day I write my thoughts (2hrs) with my right hand and my left hand, and then I throw them out. My therapist tells me this gets rid of mental garbage. It helps me cope about mommy.

I have started humor therapy. I got that from Amos Oz. I look at the pictures of Weird Florida and Weird California; it makes me goofy. I am thinking of a pilgrimage to Cabazon, Cal. where the dinosaurs Rex and Dinny are. Cabazon is about 22 miles from Palm Springs.

I noticed that on the picture of your new book you hold out your sinister hand, with the middle finger outstretched.

Bye,

Dr. Leonard Williams

If, by the grace of God, this final letter ever reached Ms. Middleton, she never did respond.

Another Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

I hate fiction with an unreliable narrator. Or do I?
--Brian Beatty

Opening paragraph: I am not Dave Eggers. I am Robin Wood. That must be said first. This is a story about the Eggers family, though, just as you expected. All your favorite characters will be here, such as Beth and Bill and little Toph, who I may say is no longer so little, though still endearing, and Moodie and Shal and Dave, of course, and the sexologist, and some others you’ve yet to meet, like Midge and Toby and Will Mathers, book editor, and his wife, Kiplinger, and the harpist, Renata, and the Restaurateur, Coby Clawson, and the wise professor, Dr. Titian, and the gospel singer, Stacey Godsend, and Watson, the quiz game writer, and others, such as a pet parrot for the boys, a steady girlfriend first for Dave, then for Toph, a drug dealer who is more than a drug dealer, a cosmopolitan mentor-type who swears his furs are faux, a Christian evangelist turned transsexual, a husband and ex-husband for Beth, and some events that you’ll be expecting, like the book deal, the move to and from Brooklyn, the kernel for Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the conversations with teaching buddies that lead to the foundation of the nonprofit gig 826 Valencia, and some events that may surprise you, among these the loss of a toenail that never does regenerate, the premeditated killing of a domesticated animal, the mugging and its psychological import, the near-loss of virginity and its psychological import, the death of another close relation (which you may in fact have been expecting), the resurrection of that same close relation, the establishment of a winsome but unsuccessful steel band, a brief period of religious fervor followed by a brief period of forlorn self-pity and hyper self-consciousness followed by a brief period of kick-ass unmitigated decadence and self-flagellating experimentation, and then the epiphany that signals the denouement and the few things that follow that, like a Whitmanesque or Ginsbergian flourish of an ending, a couple of appendices that were missing from the first book, and a couple of impossible Sudoku puzzles that delayed the completion of this book for a good two months.

Remember that I am not Dave Eggers, but rather Reed Wright, the narrator. You, along with others, including some friends, may call me Lefty. It’s a term of endearment, and I fully intend to endear myself to you as Dave did.

Having said that, my disclaimer: I am an unwilling participant in the process of this retelling, but as Poppins says, if I must, I must. And someone must because the people clamor, are clamoring! And since Eggers won’t pony up, someone else has to. The reason I’m that someone is the result of numerous innocuous coincidences between me and Dave that the publisher noticed one day during rush hour on the L train and thereafter over $3 bottles of Miller Lite at Daddy’s. These are:

(1) a genetic tendency toward volubility and self-love

(2) a love of lists and a camaraderie with the metaphysical that attends that love

(3) bad hair that everyone really likes, i.e., a meager but successful attempt at endearing self-deprecation to avoid the dismissal that comes with an arrogant-style of self-confidence

(4) an addiction to drama and tragedy

(5) an abiding Napoleonic sense of my own fate, a hint of megalomania

(6) an ambivalence that amounts to an irremediable fatalism and/or nihilism

(7) a strong belief that I’m right and others are assholes

(8) an ability to rationalize the commodification of personal tragedy with the self-effacing but trumped-up value of admitting awareness of that fact

(9) a love of maxims and the uncanny ability to create them

(10) a love of run-on sentences and the not-so-uncanny ability to write them

(11) the ability to recreate something, like a hyper self-conscious novel a la Cervantes (etc.) and pass the re-creation off as fresh and hip

(12) in the shroud of my own arrogance, never knowing when to stop

(13) a bona fide big heart and a natural tendency toward confession without apology that despite everything will endear me to you and make you wish that you knew me, that we could do drinks sometime, maybe coffee, lunch, Frisbee, origami, yoga, a road trip

(14) an abiding sense of entitlement that has been both reinforced and diluted over time (though mine comes not from a cruel fate that has subjugated me to loss, but rather from a voluntary ascetic lifestyle marked by self-deprecation and self-sacrifice as a result of an epidemic sense of social responsibility, which originated in a discarded but inescapable fundamental religious upbringing), so that while busy getting mine, I’m busily giving back.

As your narrator I recognize several serious requirements, which I will strive against the odds and maybe fate to fulfill. These include credibility, veracity, and vocal mimesis. Though I will fail at times to sound like Dave Eggers, I will always be trying, and once in a while, likely in a nondescript phrase, in some dependent clause, maybe in the painting of the New York landscape on one cold February evening when I’m alone at a bar putting this or that off, I’ll get the voice spot on, and you, you’ll do this thing that you rarely do--maybe only do when you remember a good joke ten minutes after it’s been told: you’ll smile despite yourself. If that ever happens, good intangible God, I’ll do the same. It’ll be you and me watching our brother’s wedding video ten years after the event, us seeing us at age fifteen strapped in tuxes, small, bright, wide-eyed, with our hair flung into ratted nests by the wind. The smiles we’ll share despite ourselves in front of that TV screen!

I will not be as funny as Dave, I’ll say that up front. This is my biggest deficit, and I was open about it during the interview, but they still gave me the job. Here’s how it happened.

Them: Can you write like Dave?

Me: I don’t know, to be honest, but I have read Heartbreaking a couple of times and one of his other books, too, and I’ve been writing since I was three—there were great hopes for me—and though I haven’t yet been published, I know I was always meant to be published, and when I was sixteen I got very close to being published. I was heavy into poetry at the time, you know, Ginsberg, Coleridge, Hafiz, Presley, the Lowells, W.C. Williams, the Dylans, Merrill, Mary Oliver and Philip Levine, and I had written a chapbook titled Where the Red Furniture Upholstery Sells in which there was one especially compelling poem on the lack of a term for words that have the same or similar meaning but sound different. It goes on for three quatrains in harried desperation until at the turn there’s this big epiphany via a fatal encounter with a thesaurus. Want me to recite it?

Them: Must you?

Me: It’s a loose Shakespearean sonnet.

Them: Then by all means.

Me:
At once the morgue and nursery, the start and end
of all you’ve ever said or wished to say.
You went into a dictionary one day, all
cognizant you’d need a word to lend
itself at once to higher thought, pretending
all the while to keep it real, gay,
buoyant but serene, academic and staid,
but bona fide and honest. There were friends,
past friends, who formed gold from lead and verse
from newspaper clippings: U.S. Briefing Mis-
spells Kuba. Fact or Fiction? Nixon, Kiss-
inger: Dog Lovers? Foreign words, perverse
translations, midday trips to Borders: for us
the repetitiousness of life: thesaurus.

Them: Thank you.

Me: It wasn’t published because President Nixon had just taken office and, what with the Vietnam War, and the probable end of free love, and the growing cognizance of general U.S. impotency, the country wasn’t much in the mood for poetry.

Them: No.

Me: So then I began to write humanistic essays on the Old Testament, my purpose being to prove that Jehovah always had that soft streak that gets so much attention in the New Testament, but I got sidetracked by a woman in a beautiful indigo-chartreuse dress, very form fitting, and when I woke up the next morning to the smell of her scrambled eggs, both the God of the O.T. and the God of the N.T. seemed superfluous.

Them: You’re ambitious, and we like that, but we wonder whether you’re voluble enough. For example, would you have any compunction about interru—

Me: My mother, it should be stated, often said, you ask too many questions, but it’s something I’ve never been able to modify or control.

Them: Do you want to ask us any questions now?

Me: I actually don’t have any questions left. I asked them all. I mean, I’ve answered all the questions that had answers. Now it’s just a matter of answering the answerable questions that others pose. Maybe you have a question.

Them: Are you at all hyperbolic in your depictions or descriptions?

Me: What?

Them: Do you ever exaggerate?

Me: No, never.

Them: Any other deficits?

Me: I’m not at all funny. I try to be funny, but my attempts always fall flat or make me look stupid or silly. I’m altogether too self-conscious to manage a joke that I don’t laugh at myself. I mean, I think I’m funny, but no one else does. I’ve taken that to mean that I’m not funny. Also, that no one gets me. I’m misunderstood. A loner, a lone wolf, a woman in a man’s world.

Them: That’s good enough. You’re hired. When can you start?

Me: Do you offer benefits? I have this tooth thing. At night it’s terrible pain.

So here I am. I spent the first half of the advance on a futon, a month’s supply of kitty litter for Mr. Fortune 500, and a used electric guitar, which I lent to Dave for his lessons. Bastard took it with him to S.F. The lessons lasted three months, during which Dave met Gwyneth, who swept our boy off his feet, entranced him with the long hair, the subtle body, the quick tongue, the cat eyes. She made casual sex undesirable and disrupted the Dave-Toph dynamic and thus single-handedly rearranged the tenor of the second book. On this point, Dave’s own words:

There is no second book! How many times do I have to tell you people? Huh? HUH? Would it help if I said it in Russian? ___ _______ ______ _____ _ __ _____! I wrote one goddamn book about my life and I’m not going to write another one. Not for you, not for me, not for the kids or world peace or for all the flower faces in the world. At least not for another fucking twenty-five years! Okay? You come back in twenty-five years and ask me whether I’m going to write a second memoir. Maybe then you’ll get another answer. Okay? OKAY?

You can see what she’s done, the vixen. Well, we’re here to correct it, we meaning me and the people backing the project who agree with practically the remainder of the reading world, which is clamoring, CLAMORING for another book, a family update, a novel-length Eggers Newsletter (the NewslEgger), a sequel, a second run, a second date, a second coming!
Denials of a second book were always only staged for the media hype anyway, like the suspense a would-be presidential candidate rallies when he denies aiming for the ovate office with the ergonomic leather throne and says he just wants to serve the American people in any capacity, wink wink. How do I know? you ask. I’ve read the NewslEgger. Cover to cover, every issue since its inception in 1997. The pertinent passage (one of several and the most compelling) comes from the April 2004 issue in an article written by Toph and titled, “Bright Lights, Big Shitty.”

It’s not a matter of there being enough genius left. There’s plenty of genius left for twenty more heartbreaking works. And God knows it’s not a matter of public interest or marketability. And any decision not to write it would have nothing to do with avoiding a windfall sales figure on some kind of moral ground, as if Dave owed anybody anything at this point in his life.

Of course the recurring question of motivation is nothing to the recurring question of justification. Why write the book? On what literary or personal or even public grounds should a second heartbreaking work be written? To satisfy the bulging eyes of the insatiable public voyeur? No. To further indulge the author’s vulgar sense of self-importance? No. To pilfer the private tragedies and tombs of more Eggerses? No. To apologize for the first pilfering and pillaging? No. To recapitulate another quasi-original work as original to get a second go at the Pulitzer? No. There is only one reason to write book two, and Dave said it himself, although I’ve paraphrased it here better than he originally put it:

Between you and me, Toph, I’m tired. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately—in addition to all the other things I’ve been doing—and I’ve come to the conclusion that to write another heartbreaking work may be impossible. I mean, how many chucks can a woodchuck chuck? But assuming I could write it, I can only conceive of one viable reason to do it, which I can sum up in a stunning re-vision of a worn-out idiom: the grass is not greener anywhere, let alone on the other side. You know, I wrote Heartbreaking with a couple of goals in mind: one, to make money and, two, to exorcise the demons of the past, in the tradition of the confessional poets or Maugham in Of Human Bondage, in order to move on with my life as so many other brow-beaten boys have moved on with their lives, fate be damned, via pen and paper and a self-indulgent streak. It’s a long, hardy tradition. Listen to Maugham:

Fact and fiction are inextricably mingled: the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened, and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate.

The effect of writing Of Human Bondage was as Maugham had hoped. Early demons were exorcised, and Maugham’s work turned into new and more exotic channels.

That last bit was from some critic’s beloved editorial. But do you know what I got for my troubles aside from the money? An ulcer, Toph. I got an ulcer the size of New Hampshire and an addiction to Tylenol with codeine. And this: a realization that in order to expiate myself I can’t excoriate others. Turns out I’m just burning everyone’s grass with my self-indulgent exposé, and so now I can take my idiom further: it’s not just that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, Toph, it’s that it’s simply not green, anywhere. I don’t care where you are. You could be standing in the middle of the goddamn Scottish links and the grass would still be some variation on the theme of brown, and so do you now see what I’m saying? Do you see what I’m getting at here, Toph? The only reason I might do a sequel would be to express, however futile those attempts, the one truth that seems to hold universally: that the world is weary and brown, and that inside me as inside countless others it is shrinking. Topher, I’m not sure that any of us can handle another heart break at the sight of the incredible shrinking world.

You cannot fail to miss the conflict, nascent to the nature of so many artists, between one’s creative impulse and one’s nagging self-doubt. But then, what is indecision if not the sensitivity to oneself and the world context that comprises the artistic temperament?

But if you failed to pay proper attention, you may have missed what Toph euphemistically calls the “one reason to write book two.” I did. Which is why I decided to write the book: to figure it out. So this book is a grail-search, if I may be so dramatic. By the end of the book I hope to elucidate that “one reason” and with one smooth motion solve the mystery of the unwritten book, satiate our collective urge to peep once more at the Eggers’s family album and drink the grail fluid of piggy-backed book fame.

Stereotyped

I was at Sparky’s waiting for the cashier to run my card, and this guy, this lanky dude, he comes up next to me and pulls a dollar bill from the tip jar. THE TIP JAR.

I'm incredulous, and I look at him, incredulously, and I say, "Did you just take a dollar from the tip jar?"

Now he looks incredulous and he says to me, "Naw, man, I wouldn't take nothin'. Why you fuckin' with me, motherfucker, accusin' me of taking a dollar, I ain't take no dollar from no fuckin' tip jar, man."

So, I turn to the cashier, Lauren, whose back had been turned at the time of the alleged theft, and I say, "He just stole a dollar from your tip jar." I mean it was plain as day, and he even feigned interest in some advertisement they had on the counter with his other hand, the red herring.

The cashier says to him, "Why don't you just leave?" and he says, "I didn't take no motherfuckin' dollar," and I say, "You got to be smoother than that, bro."

But I don't really consider him my bro. In fact, on the inside, I want him to escalate the whole thing so that we can hit each other. There's this part of me, this latent part, that really just wants to hit him, or to get hit, or both, just for the simple fact that I've lived my whole life as a chameleon working a survival game to avoid getting hit, and because it's just immoral and stupid to take A DOLLAR BILL from a tip jar.

Maybe it's also immoral and stupid to call someone out for taking A DOLLAR BILL from the tip jar, but I really couldn't help myself. You'll recall, I was incredulous. And I know the employees of Sparky’s. At one time I may have considered some of them my friends. Certainly good acquaintances, ones you don’t mind saying hi to.

So, I'm waiting for my iced whatever-I-ordered, and the lanky guy is sulking in the back of the shop, and when I look up at him, with morbid curiosity, not heroism, he flips me the bird, begins to mutter something and stands to come over.

It seems worthwhile, if not irrelevant, to note that at the time I'm trying out some hand-me-down shorts that my friend, Betsy, whose apartment I'm sitting at the moment, got from her Brit ex-boyfriend, so they're not long skater shorts from House of Tired West Coast Trends. No, these are shorts that say one or more of three things: (1) I'm gay, (2) I'm not from here or anywhere in America, or (3) I’m just in from or heading to the links for a nice, leisurely nine with three other paunchy mid-lifers.

So he comes over and I meet his glare and he says, "I'm gonna fuck you up so bad your mamma won't even recognize you" and "you better watch it if you want your life to stay the way it is" and maybe other stuff.

And I say, and here it is, the climax, "Are you threatening me?" which is a lame line for a climax and kind of a stock movie phrase from some Eighties Charles Bronson flick. But the intention to stand up is there, however reflexive and unpremeditated, and also that latent desire to hit, to be hit, to fight, to make the usurpers and freeloaders of the world pay not only for all the people they flippantly use but also for all the times I ROLLED OVER AND SHUT MY EYES.

Now you're wondering how the story ends, aren't you? And you’re waiting for me to state the racial element outright.

Well it just ends, and the clash of white and black plays more into the subtext of the event, so that only afterward when I’m writing it all up I start to hedge about stating race and to think a little like Baldwin’s nameless main character in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” who wonders whether white customs workers at NYC immigration are laughing at him or if it’s just his imagination.

So the only way, then or now, I can approach the race issue is with irony, as a fictional character ignorant by some margin of the reality of the reader and the author, able to process facts with only the crudest of measures, to apply a rough stencil to events that happened too fast to admit use of original dialogue, to realize that I'm the idiot who taught him a lesson only an educated upper-middle class white boy coulda taught.

So, the cashier comes out from behind the counter and she asks dude to leave, and he begins to protest that he's with someone and he points at this homegrown, southern belle type standing in line, and again I am incredulous. Interesting couple, I think. Not only black and white but hood and small-town parade queen. She seems perturbed but doesn’t look around, as if she were embarrassed about the whole thing or upset that I foiled their plans. So Clyde left and Bonnie, as it turns out, didn’t even order a drink. She just got change for A DOLLAR BILL.