by Tim Wirkus
My original plan had been to wait out the economic storm in grad school, but after two rounds of applications to seventeen different MFA programs had resulted in nothing but rejections, it seemed clear that this wasn’t going to happen. During my second round of applications, though, I’d also applied for a handful of fellowships and grants, and about a month after my last MFA rejection, I got a letter informing me I’d been awarded a Young Religious Novelist Grant. I would be given seven thousand dollars to research and compose a novel “that elucidated the joys of twenty-first-century religious experience.”
You’ve probably never heard of a Young Religious Novelist Grant before. (Okay, you’ve definitely never heard of a Young Religious Novelist Grant before, because that’s not what it’s really called. This seems like as good a time as any to let you know that I’ve changed the names and distinguishing characteristics of several people and institutions who appear in this account. As I think will become clear, I have good reason for doing so.) I hadn’t heard of the grant before I’d applied, but the prospect of seven thousand dollars thrilled me. I was less thrilled when the contract arrived. Even though I couldn’t understand a lot of the legal jargon, I did get the sense that there might be some pretty thick strings attached to the money. I couldn’t find much about the YRNG online—only that the grant’s sponsoring organization was a group called the Coalition of Aggrieved Christians, whose name made me nervous. They had virtually no Internet presence, which worried me even more.
The letter did include a contact number, so I gave it a call. When I introduced myself to the man who answered, he sounded glad to hear from me. He said his name was Wayne Fortescue and his job was to answer any questions I had about the grant.
“Perfect,” I said. “What can you tell me about the Coalition of Aggrieved Christians?”
“Our sponsoring organization!” he said. “You’ve done some research!”
“Yeah,” I said. “I actually couldn’t find much about them online.”
“That’s a very deliberate move,” said Wayne Fortescue, like it was supposed to impress me.
“Why?” I said.
“They don’t like to toot their own horn,” said Fortescue. “They’re very modest. In short, though, the CAC’s mission is to defend and enhance the quality of religious experience in America for folks like you and me.”
“All right,” I said evenly, like his answer hadn’t set off all sorts of alarm bells. “And what does that involve exactly?”
“Just like a writer,” he said. “Full of questions.”
I thought I detected a hint of warning in this response.
“If you’re not comfortable talking about this—” I said.
“Are you kidding me?” said Fortescue. “I love nothing more than talking about the Coalition. Ask me whatever you want.”
He said it cheerfully but with a sharp undertone that suggested I should be sorry for asking any questions at all. That alone would normally be enough for me to end the conversation right there.
Seven thousand dollars, though.
“What I’m looking for,” I said, “is a basic overview of what the Coalition does.”
Fortescue rattled off a boilerplate response that was high on praise for the Coalition’s virtues and low on concrete information regarding what they actually did or believed.
I decided to explore a different avenue.
“I guess my biggest question,” I said, “is whether the novel I write needs to conform in any way to the Coalition’s ideologies. Whatever those might be.”
“Oh no,” said Fortescue, a little too quickly. “Of course not. That’s not what this is at all. Not. At. All.”
“So I can write about whatever I want,” I said.
I needed an explicit yes.
“We’re here to help you,” said Fortescue.
“I can write about whatever I want, then,” I said.
“The grant committee was very interested in the novel you proposed—Mormon missionaries in Brazil? That’s the novel we would hope you’d write.”
“And that is what I’m planning on writing—” I began.
“Good,” interrupted Fortescue.
“But what I’d like to know is if there’s any situation where you guys would—I don’t know—ask for your money back or something.”
I’d meant the question as a joke, but it came out with an involuntary tremor.
“That rarely happens,” said Fortescue, his voice low and soothing.
“Rarely?” I said.
“There was a grant recipient a few years back,” said Fortescue, not missing a beat, “who ran into some difficulties with her novel, and made some poor choices as a result. Unfortunately, we had to repossess her funding.”
“What kinds of poor choices?” I said.
“I’d rather not say,” said Fortescue. “Furthermore, papers were signed, and I’m obliged to maintain a level of confidentiality regarding the situation.”
At some point we had slipped into the sinister realm of legalese.
“I’ll be honest,” I said. “That worries me.”
“Shoot!” said Fortescue, all homespun joviality. “I’ve spooked you! Let me assure you that you have no need to worry, Dan. Can I call you Dan?”
“Sure.”
“Dan, I’ll level with you,” he said, all man-to-man. “That young woman I mentioned, she was not CAC material. Just not a great fit, ultimately—our mistake as much as hers. But you, my friend, are a whole different story. A whole different story.”
I thought of all the reasons why that response should concern me. Then I thought of how behind I was on my student loan payments. I thought of my doughnut grease–infused apartment. I thought of the frozen potpies and instant oatmeal that had made up my primary diet for the past several months.
I thought of everything I could do with seven thousand dollars.
I thanked Wayne Fortescue for his help. I got off the phone, and before I could change my mind, I signed the contract and dropped it in the mail.
Now, four days into my trip to São Paulo, the money was gone (student loan payments, travel expenses), the novel was dead in the water, and Wayne Fortescue, still unaware of those last two developments, was not going to be happy.
The moment I realized I would never finish my novel, I was sitting in an air-conditioned study room of the Biblioteca Anita Garibaldi, one of the University of São Paulo’s forty-five libraries, reading a densely written monograph on the city’s architecture during the coffee-boom years. I turned a page halfway through a chapter critiquing Ramos de Azevedo’s Theatro Municipal, and realized I couldn’t bring myself to read another word. It was so much to take in, and the more research I’d done over the past few days, the more research I realized I’d need to do to make the novel even halfway decent. That would have been fine, if I hadn’t also finally admitted to myself that I had no interest in writing the novel I’d pitched to the CAC. Not that novel or anything like it. I closed the architecture book and set it back on top of the to-read pile that I’d ambitiously stacked there when I arrived at the library that morning.
Every failure deserves a soundtrack, and on that sorry day at the Biblioteca Anita Garibaldi, mine was “There She Goes,” by the La’s. I know you’ve heard this song before. The album version is a rom-com staple, a jangly, Steve Lillywhite–produced pop confection. But the band also recorded a live version for BBC radio that’s not as warm or polished. The vocals are rougher, the guitars more jagged, the production more spare, and it totally skews the feel of the song. The album version has a sweet, wistful vibe to it, but the BBC version, even though it’s not that different, sounds like the aural instantiation of pure anxiety, especially once the song hits the 1:40 mark and the backup vocals come in, pleading and echoey.
I spent the rest of the morning listening to that song on repeat through
a pair of crummy earbuds, drenched in flop sweat. As disappointed as I was by this artistic impasse, I was more worried about the financial consequences of my failure. I thought of the contract I’d signed for the Coalition of Aggrieved Christians, and of all the vague yet sinewy strings attached to the money I’d already spent. To keep my nervous hands busy, I collaged all of the tiny sticky notes I’d brought with me into a colorful seascape on top of my desk—a vivid orange ship floating on electric-blue waters, and beneath it all, a colossal pink squid reaching its tentacles upward toward the unsuspecting ship. I was tearing a bit of notebook paper into a circle to make the squid’s right eye when I felt someone watching me.
I looked up.
Sérgio, my liaison at the library, stood in the doorway of the study room, hands clasped behind his back. I pulled out my earbuds and set down the paper.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or extra considerate.
“No problem,” I said.
I placed Sérgio somewhere in his fifties, broad and slightly paunchy, with long, graying hair that he kept back in a neat ponytail. His accompanying beard was carefully trimmed, and overall he cultivated a distinguished, countercultural air—a diplomat from the underground. That morning, he wore faded jeans, a Raul Seixas T-shirt, and a gray linen blazer.
“And your research,” he said. “It’s going well?”
Again, I couldn’t tell if he was being sincere or not.
“This is a prewriting exercise that I do,” I said, nodding at the sticky-note collage. “It helps me.”
“I’m happy to hear it,” said Sérgio.
He slipped his hands into his pockets and stepped into the study room. Lips pursed, he gave the paper squid on top of my desk a long hard look.
“Today I’m researching the architecture of São Paulo,” I said. “Interesting stuff.”
“The coffee-boom era,” said Sérgio, noticing the cover of the book I’d set aside.
“Yes,” I said, but had nothing to add.
I knew that Wayne Fortescue had been in contact with Sérgio to coordinate my time at the library, but I wasn’t sure in what capacity Sérgio currently operated. Was he liaising solely between me and the library or between me and the library and Fortescue? Was he sending the CAC updates on what books and articles I consulted and how I used my time? I wasn’t sure how careful I needed to be around him, so I opted for full discretion.
“Yes,” I repeated. “The work is going very well.”
Sérgio said, “I found a story you wrote.”
This caught me off guard.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, a tension in his voice that I couldn’t read. “About a woman’s visit to an art museum.”
“That’s the one,” I said.
A small but respectable journal had run the story when I was a junior at BYU. It was my only publication to date, a cosmic fluke apparently. I’d written reams of short stories since then and gotten back nothing but rejections. I had hoped a novel might turn the tide, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen.
Sérgio pointed to my backpack slouched on the floor.
“Please pick that up and come with me,” he said. “Leave the books for now.”
I grabbed my bag and followed Sérgio out the door. I had no idea what he was up to, but it seemed serious. We walked past the restrooms, past some more glass study rooms, past a long bank of multicolored reference books. Sérgio opened a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” and we descended a flight of stairs, passed through another door, and descended another, even narrower staircase. The deeper we went, the more nervous I got. Finally, the stairs opened onto a long hallway lined with dented metal doors. Sérgio reached into his pocket and pulled out a cluttered ring of keys. As we made our way down the hall, he fumbled through the keys until we came to a door, identical to the rest except for a plaque at eye level that read, “Sérgio Antunes, Sublibrarian.” Sérgio unlocked the door, opened it, and gestured for me to enter. It was a tiny broom closet of an office, which contained in total three items: a metal folding chair, an attached desk-chair combo of the type used in public high schools, and a two-drawer filing cabinet. Even with so little furniture, there was barely enough room inside for the two of us.
“Please,” said Sérgio, “have a seat.”
I sat down on the folding chair. Sérgio left the door, which opened into the hallway, slightly ajar and sat down at the desk. I wiped my sweating palms on the sides of my pant legs.
“You’re a missionary?” he said.
“I used to be,” I said, “a few years ago. Now I’m trying to write a novel about it.”
“Cashing in on your experience,” he said.
“Well,” I said.
I shifted in my chair. Sérgio folded his hands on the desk in front of him.
“So who do you read?” he said. “I mean, who are your favorites?”
I told him James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson. I wondered where he was going with this.
“Any science fiction?” he said.
“Not really,” I said. “A little Bradbury, I guess.”
“But you do know Salgado-MacKenzie, correct?” he said.
“Who?” I said.
“Salgado-MacKenzie,” he said. “Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie.”
“No,” I said, “I’ve never heard of him.”
Sérgio slapped his palm against the surface of his desk with such force that the sound echoed off the bare walls of the room and into the hallway.
“You must have,” he said.
I shook my head. This was getting intense.
“Are you sure?” he said.
“I’m pretty sure,” I said.
“I was positive you had read him,” he said, a note of accusation in his voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Sérgio leaned his elbows on the desk and ran his hands through his hair with a sigh.
“Your art museum story,” he said, his voice softer now, deflated. “What was it called—‘The Gallery Within’?”
“Yeah.”
Sérgio nodded.
“That story reminded me of one of Salgado-MacKenzie’s—‘Without Anger or Fondness,’ it’s called. The premise is, there’s a museum on Mars that displays great works of art that were salvaged from Earth before Earth was essentially destroyed by nuclear war. One day, a woman named Dolores da Gama visits the museum; Dolores was born on Earth, but her family fled to Mars just before everything went haywire.
“Dolores is at the museum, then, looking at the art on display, and at first she’s enjoying herself, but then she starts to feel like something’s off. She’s not sure why, but something about these paintings makes her very uncomfortable. Finally, she gets to Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe—you know, Manet’s picnic painting—and figures out what’s wrong. Instead of lounging in a verdant French grove, the picnickers have reclined in the middle of a severe, red rock Martian landscape. Everything else is just as it should be—the man in the round black hat, the inexplicably nude woman, the fruit spilling artfully from the basket—but they are unmistakably picnicking on Mars. More confounding still, the style of the landscape is completely appropriate. If Manet had ever painted the surface of Mars, this is exactly what it would’ve looked like, which somehow upsets Dolores even more.
“Now she goes back through the rooms she’s already visited, and sure enough, each painting is subtly but unmistakably set on Mars: Raphael’s The Alba Madonna, Hopper’s Cape Cod Evening, El Greco’s Laocoön, Botticelli’s Primavera, Gainsborough’s The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, and on and on—all of them featuring red rock landscapes painted in the unmistakable styles of the original artists.
“With each altered painting she se
es, Dolores grows angrier and angrier. Who would perpetrate such an elaborate and senseless prank? In a room with Delacroix’s Girl Seated in a Cemetery—altered like all the rest—she grabs the security guard by the arm and asks what happened to all the original paintings. The security guard has no idea what she’s talking about, so Dolores demands to speak with the museum’s curator. The guard obliges, leading her to the main offices, where the curator listens politely to the woman’s concerns and then patiently explains that the paintings have not been altered since being brought from Earth. Dolores argues with the curator, tries to prove somehow that these are not the original paintings, but she can’t. She has no photographs or prints of the original paintings, so it’s ultimately her word against the curator’s. Eventually, Dolores gives up.
“In the next scene, she’s standing again in front of Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and at first she’s still angry, but the longer she looks at the painting, the more the Martian version resonates with her. She can still remember the non-Mars version, but this new red rock setting seems so right somehow. It just fits, and Dolores finds it harder and harder to imagine the painting looking any other way. On her way out of the museum, she stops by the gift shop and buys a framed print of the painting—the Mars version—and goes home feeling oddly vindicated.
“So there you go. Obviously, there are some key differences from your story, but there were enough similarities, even some turns of phrase, that I thought your story had to be an homage to Salgado-MacKenzie.”
There actually was a strong similarity there; my story’s about a woman who insists that a painting by her late husband has been altered by the museum that displays it, although she can’t pinpoint how exactly. But I’d never heard of Eduard Salgado-MacKenzie or read his Martian art museum story.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know that story.”
Another sigh from Sérgio. I felt bad disappointing him.
