Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  She leads me inside the studio walking at the fastest pace I’ve ever walked. We’re not even late. I think she just wants to be sure she’s getting a proper workout in. I remember her saying something in the SUV about how people didn’t know how to walk. Something about how we all use the wrong muscles to commit the act. I’m not exactly sure what she means, but she seems serious about it.

  So be it.

  “My author is here for his interview,” she says to the receptionist. The receptionist is a thin man with close-cut hair and skinny jeans but he doesn’t seem like one of those skinny-jean assholes. He seems like a decent guy. He tells us to take a seat and that we shouldn’t have to wait long. Then he turns back to his dominoes.

  The dominoes.

  Oh, the dominoes.

  I’ve never seen so many stacked so perfectly. Not outside of a television commercial. I can’t say exactly how many there are, but the number’s gotta be in the hundreds at least. Thousands, maybe. They come in all kinds of colors and they’re everywhere. They sit on the desk and spill over onto the floor and the chair and along places on the wall where there were shelves.

  It looks like it took eight lifetimes to set up this whole grab bag of fun. Maybe millennia.

  As I sit there, fascinated by the dominoes, Bonnie signs the sign-in sheet and then drops down to the densely carpeted floor and bangs out a set of push-ups. She does the kind where she springs up and claps her hands at the top of the movement. Damned impressive stuff, if you ask me.

  Time drags on in this place. Nothing ever seems to start on time when you’re on tour and fighting demons inside your head. The last thing I want is to sit here with time to think. I’ve got to do something.

  Without being asked, I walk over and start helping the receptionist with his project. Strange thing happens then: turns out helping is pretty easy. I seem to know what to do even before I touch my first domino. It’s like I’ve been helping to build the domino thing my whole life. Like it’s my project, my bag. I kinda feel like I’m creating something big and important. I kinda feel like I’m creating myself.

  “So how long have you worked here?” I ask the receptionist.

  “Worked where?” he replies, his focus never wavering from this big pile of awesome we’re working on.

  I make a gesture to the dominoes. “So what’s it supposed to look like in the end?”

  “What end?”

  The exchange gets broken off early by the appearance of a TV producer who pokes her head out from behind the big, tall door at the end of the hallway. She calls my name.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re ready for you.”

  When I go over to the door, she shakes my hand like my uncle used to shake his tobacco pouch before he dipped. “Hell of a book, by the way.”

  “So I hear,” I say.

  I turn to take one final look back on what I’m leaving behind. Those dominoes. I feel like me and that receptionist were only a few pieces away from finishing it all up. And if I finished it all up, then the whole universe would be laid bare before us. Everything would be answered. The Kid might even come back!

  But there’s no time. The interview waits for me like the final chapter of a novel. Like some boss battle in a video game. Can’t hide forever.

  I enter the room. The door closes behind me.

  I think I hear the dominoes fall.

  * * *

  —

  The lights are bright and the intro music annoying. IT’S A typical three-camera setup with an elevated stage and a small studio audience. You know the type: the morning talk show where they give away free tickets to the Rotary Club and the Farmers Guild, and all the old people who don’t have much else to do with themselves at this time of the morning come out to see what type of guest their local affiliate has managed to land.

  Today it’s me.

  “. . . So we’re back,” the interviewer says. She’s a tall, thin White woman with sharp features and a smile like a mouthful of porcelain squares. She’s nice and bubbly in that morning talk show way, so I guess she fits the bill for the job. “We’re almost at the end of our hour-long interview with ———, the author of Hell of a Book.” She shows the book one final time and turns and looks at me with that toothy smile of hers. “I just wanted to thank you again for taking the time out to join us here on the Morning Soup.”

  “It’s been really great being here,” I say in my best end-of-interview voice.

  “Oh, we’re just so glad we could have you here to talk about your book.”

  She smiles.

  I smile.

  The audience smiles.

  “So,” she says, “tell us what your book is about.”

  My smile fades just a little. I look up at the clock. It’s just seconds before 10 a.m. We’ve been here for an hour already. Why does she want a recap in the closing ten seconds of the show?

  I smile. “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, c’mon. Don’t be shy. Tell us about your book. That’s why you’re here, after all.” She smiles at me, then smiles at the camera.

  “You mean again?” I ask. “I’m not sure we’ve got time for me to do it again. After all, we’ve been doing it for the last hour.” I smile at her, then I smile at the camera.

  I take another quick glance up at the clock on the far wall of the studio. My stomach sinks. The clock says it’s only two minutes after 9 a.m. But that can’t be right. So I check my wristwatch. Somehow, it says the same thing. Tells the same lie. According to the two of these, the interview is only just beginning.

  “I promise you,” I say to the interviewer, “we just had this conversation. You and I have just spent an hour talking about my book.”

  “Nonsense,” the host says, “we’ve only just begun, as the old song goes.”

  She laughs a little. The studio audience laughs stiffly. They’re trying to figure out what’s happening with the author in front of them. And the author in front of them is trying to figure out what’s happening with the life in front of him.

  I feel myself beginning to sweat.

  “Now,” the interviewer begins, “tell us—”

  “We’ve already done enough of this,” I bark. “We’ve already had this interview. Can we please not do it again? I don’t want to talk about my book any more right now.” My tie feels like it’s choking me. It feels like some wrestler has taken a liking to my trachea. So I loosen it and wipe the sweat from my neck. I look up at the clock on the wall. Only 55 more minutes of interview to go.

  “Well . . .” the interviewer says. She’s being gentle. Kinder than she has to be.

  “I don’t understand why I have to keep telling this story again and again,” I say. My breaths come fast and staggered. “I don’t understand any of this whole process. The interviews, the hotels, the readings. Why can’t I just write and go away? That’s all I want to do. Why can’t I just give one interview and be done with it? Why do I have to keep reliving this same day over and over again?”

  “Because people want to hear it,” the interviewer says. “Because you’re an author and this is what you wanted.”

  I’m having trouble breathing but it seems as though I’m the only one who notices. I look around the room, hoping for something to happen, for someone to come, for anything that can get me through the next hour, the next interview that I’ve given a hundred times before already. I’m trapped by my own novel and no one will let me escape.

  “So let’s begin,” the interviewer says. “Your book is all based on actual events.”

  “No,” I say, correcting her. “It’s fiction. It says so right there on the front cover. It says ‘a novel.’ That makes it fiction. I keep saying that and everyone keeps telling me something different. I’ve already told you, I’ve told everyone, it’s fiction. It’s all fiction. None of it is real. Nothing is real.”

 
She looks at me and laughs. “Yeah, right!” she says. Then the audience laughs. “Now, tell us all the story. Tell us about how this novel came into being. Tell us the inspiration for it. The plot points. The pain you went through to write it. The self-doubt. The terror. The insecurity. We want it all. Tell it just like you’ve told it every time before.”

  I can barely breathe now. I keep rubbing my neck because I need to be sure that someone’s hand isn’t wrapped around it, closing off my airway. I scan the room again, looking for an exit, maybe. But the room doesn’t seem to have any doors. It’s just a box and I’m trapped in it, with the cameras, the host, and the audience.

  The audience. I could have sworn there were only a few of them a moment ago. Fifteen or twenty at most. There’s at least double that now. Maybe triple. All of their eyes aimed at me. I can feel the heat from their staring.

  It’s then that I see her.

  She’s seated in the front row, wearing her hospital gown. Watching me. I don’t understand how I didn’t see her sooner.

  “So, let’s go back over the basis for this book again,” the interviewer says.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But I’m afraid we have to.”

  “No,” I say. “I want this to end.”

  “This will never end,” she says.

  I look out over the audience once more. I see Renny, somehow. I see Renny’s wife, Martha. The TSA agent. My agent. My publicist. My editor. Sean. Every Kelly I’ve ever dated. The apparition of Nic Cage. The Culture Crew from Cubicle Hell. Bonnie. The receptionist with the dominoes. The receptionist with the Post-it notes. I see some kid in a well-cut suit that looks a lot like me. I see my old man. I see the woman in her hospital gown.

  They all stare at me.

  The studio lights are blindingly bright all of a sudden. I shade my eyes.

  “So,” the interviewer continues, “tell us what it was like to watch your mother die.”

  “What?”

  The studio cameras push in closer to me.

  “She died slowly, didn’t she?” the interviewer says. She picks up her copy of Hell of a Book and begins reading from it. “It was a painful, protracted affair. A wasting away that bled from one sunrise to another.”

  “Stop that,” I say.

  “But these are your words.”

  “Are they? I don’t remember.”

  That’s the truth. I can’t remember anything about my book. Haven’t been able to since I wrote it. Writing it was like carving out a piece of myself. And once it was cut away, I left it there. I moved on, perhaps a little more incomplete than before, but at least able to ignore the pain of the emptiness more than I could bear the pain of memory.

  “You don’t remember?” she asks.

  “No,” I say.

  “Of course you remember,” she says. “And that’s what scares you. You thought writing it all down would make you not remember, make you forget how badly it hurt. But now you have to retell it again and again, piece by piece. All of those little retellings adding up to reach the point where you’re constantly reliving it. Pebbles become a mountain. It’s called a Hell of a Book.”

  “I know what it’s called! I fucking wrote it! I wrote you! I wrote all of you! So don’t you think I know what it’s called?!”

  A stunned pause.

  “Excuse me?” the interviewer says. “What do you mean you wrote me?”

  “You’re not real,” I sob. I’m not sure when the crying started. But it did. “None of you are real. You’re just characters. Imaginings.” I swallow. “Aren’t you?”

  Another look around the studio. Everyone I have ever known in my entire life is there now. Looking at me. Watching me crumble. But in front of them all is the woman in the hospital gown . . . my mother.

  I realize now that every interview I have ever had about my book has been an interview about her death. It’s why I don’t remember them afterward.

  “What’s your book about?”

  “It’s about the death of my mother.”

  I see myself clearly, in all of the interviews, going over the story:

  “It was Mother’s Day weekend,” I begin. “I was going away on a trip and she asked to come with me. She wanted to make it a mother-son expedition. Something that we would remember. But I told her no. She almost cried, I think. But it didn’t matter. I left.

  “On Mother’s Day, as I was driving back home, I got the phone call. She’d been out working in the garden and collapsed. She was in the hospital. When I got to the hospital, they said she’d had a stroke. Said they didn’t know how extensive the damage was, but they didn’t want to set my expectations too high.

  “She was in a coma for a week. When she came out of it, I was there—guilt had forged me into a responsible son, the type who would not leave her side. She looked up at me with bleary eyes and said ‘Home.’

  “The doctors called it aphasia. The mind says one thing. The mouth says another. You’re trapped inside your own head. Much like being a writer. For six weeks, she saw me and she called me ‘Home.’ Over, and over, and over again she said it. Everything was ‘Home.’ If she was thirsty, she asked for ‘home.’ If she was hungry, she asked for ‘home.’ When I kissed her on the brow and told her good night, the last thing she said to me before falling asleep was ‘home.’

  “Then, she died. And I can’t decide if it was because she finally went home, or if it was because I could never take her out of the hospital, could never actually take her away, back to the glorious place in her memory where she raised her only son. I failed at that. I failed her.”

  . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

  “And then, one day, I wrote a book about it. It made me successful. I took her love and turned it into profit because I wanted to get away from her, wanted to write her out of my mind.”

  . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

  I looked up at the audience. I saw only her.

  “Didn’t work.”

  The sound of that heart monitor rings in my ears, coming from everywhere all at once.

  I’m sweating and gasping for air now. I don’t know when it started, but I can’t breathe.

  “Are you okay?” the interviewer asks. “Maybe we should take a question from our audience. How about that?” The interviewer smiles and aims a finger at the studio audience where a woman is waiting. Her skin is the color of mahogany. She wears her hair in a ponytail. A flowered skirt hangs from her waist crowned by a red blouse. She looks so much like my mother I can hardly breathe. All the lines of my life are blurring together. “You there,” the interviewer says. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “May I come up there?” the woman asks. It’s about this time that I recognize her.

  “Of course you can,” the interviewer replies, flashing a mouthful of glowing white teeth. “You can have my seat, actually.”

  “Don’t,” I protest.

  But she walks up onstage. Somehow, she is two things at once, the way a memory is both alive and dead. She is my dead mother and she is The Kid’s mother. She is the dead mother of all the dead sons, dead daughters. My heart can’t believe my eyes and so, because it is ruined in disbelief, my heart hurts.

  “My boy is dead,” The Kid’s mother says. “He was shot and killed a few weeks back. Maybe you heard about it.” Her voice trembles as she speaks. Her hands struggle with each other in her lap.

  “Yes,” I say. I want to reach out and take her hands in mine, settle down the conflict between them, the same conflict I’ve seen in my own extremities. It’s the battle between wanting to accept life, and feeling powerless to change it. “I heard about your son,” I say, catching my breath as I look into my mother’s eyes even as I look into the eyes of a stranger. “I tried to feel something for him when I heard, but when I dug down, there was nothing there. Nothing in my belly,
you know? Been that way ever since my mother died, I think. Something got miswired after that. It hurt to feel, so I stopped doing it.”

  The woman who both is and is not my mother nods gently. “I know,” she says as the tears begin to fall. “But mothers are supposed to die. Not their children. And their children aren’t supposed to give up when their parents die.”

  I know this woman is not my mother. She is memory and imagination gone too far, no matter what her visage might tell my heart. I don’t know how she got here. I don’t know where she came from or what she wants from me and, most of all, I don’t know if she’s real. But it doesn’t matter. Her stare, her tear-streaked face, they’re the only thing I really need to see and know about right now.

  “What did my boy do?” she asks. “What did he do to deserve to die like that?”

  “In my experience, life doesn’t care much about what we deserve.”

  “But what about God? Why did God let this happen?”

  “Don’t ask me questions like that. I’m just a writer. We’ve already got enough of a God complex and I can’t pretend to know the hows and whys of whatever God people happen to believe in at this time.”

  I look out to the studio audience, but they are all gone. Empty chairs. Unmanned cameras. The terror of disappearing lives.

  There’s just her and me, buried in our grief in the empty studio.

  “I don’t know what to do with it,” the mother says.

  “Neither do I.”

  “It’s not supposed to happen.”

  “I guess death isn’t supposed to happen, but it’s the only thing that we can ever really depend on. It makes time for each and every one of us.”

  “What kind of answer is that? My son is dead!”

  “I know,” I say. “And I’m sorry about that. Even though I don’t know you and have only just met you, I’m sorry about that. Believe it or not, the death of your son keeps me up at night. It makes me uneasy. It tightens me up inside because I know that I should stop everything I’m doing in my life in order to mourn with you, in order to let you know that you are not alone, in order to let you know that your son truly mattered and that his death was a tragedy that cannot happen again in this world. I want all of that.” I want to say something more, but can’t find the courage on account of how I know what she’ll ask. I know that she’ll keep me talking and the more I talk the more I’ll feel. It’s as inevitable as a fucking freight train bearing down on your head. I wish that she would go away. I wish I could change the channel, close the window, open a new tab, swipe her away from my reality.