Fugue State

by Brian Evenson

  That night, after a light dinner which again recalled Craven’s work—the poached salmon found in the novella Box of Sky—Sindt climbed the circular staircase to the tower and again saw the light thrown on the ceiling. He can’t stay up all night, he told himself. This time I will watch until he falls asleep. I will watch all night. I will find him out.

  He stayed up, seated at the window, resting his arms on the sill, watching Craven’s malfocused back, his slight and minute movements only partly available through the glass. If only I had a pair of binoculars, he thought, and wandered the house in search of those or some sort of spyglass, finding nothing save the thick bottom of a whiskey tumbler, which, while it admittedly magnified things, severely distorted them at the same time. This too, he realized, could have been an object from one of Craven’s books, and though it was in none of the published books, perhaps it would be found in the book Craven was writing in the greenhouse now. When Sindt returned to the tower, Craven was still in the greenhouse, still at his desk, the papers in the pile on one side migrating slowly to the pile of paper on the other side. Sindt sat again at the window and for a time moved the tumbler from eye to eye to eye; through it, the greenhouse became a ghost of light, the light striking rings into the poorly ground glass base. After a while, he set the tumbler down on the floor, leaned again on his elbows. A little while more and his chin slipped onto the sill, and then he was waking up, morning having long arrived, his back sore, his body half-slid from the chair.

  It was like that the next night and the next, and Craven each morning as bright and unblemished as if he had been freshly created instead of having spent all night at a desk, writing. Sindt, though, felt increasingly disoriented, hardly able to sleep either at night or during the day. It was as if there were more than one Craven: one who wrote, another who appeared in Tyrolean garb by daylight, perhaps others as well. He asked Craven, or one of the Cravens, if he had a pair of binoculars, and though Craven claimed that yes, he did, and that yes, Sindt could borrow them, he never produced them. Their relations seemed to Sindt to become more strained and he felt they spent their days circling one another, excessively formal (he realized this was a description as well of Jansen and Jensen’s interactions in Craven’s Moody Mouths), as Craven or Cravens waited for evening to come so they could write and Sindt awaited an evening of trying to make things out through glass. How is your writing coming? Sindt finally asked, and was surprised when Craven answered, I’m not writing. I haven’t written a word in weeks. Yet there he was, below, scribbling away, night after night. Though Sindt could not, through the glass roof, make out the words—or even for that matter make out that there were words—he sat, peering out over the sill, trying by force of will to make his eyes see farther and farther. But he could never make out enough: only Craven, only the papers’ slow flight from one sheaf to the other, a few sheets a night. He tried to imagine what was on each sheet, pieced together scenes from an imaginary novel, wondering where, if anywhere, he fit in.

  By day he went through the house, searching for Craven’s room, but there was no sign that any of the other rooms were occupied. Well over a week into the visit, he had still not caught even a glimpse of the cook. The pile of blankets on the pantry floor never seemed to have been slept in. There were, he thought, too many Cravens and too few chefs, and then he winced as he remembered another line from Velvet Fury

  Too many ravens and too few corpses

  for it seemed that the syntax of Craven’s sentences was rewiring his head.

  He would leave, he told himself, he would pack his things and depart that night. He even managed to fill and close his suitcase and sit in the chair awaiting darkness. But darkness was scarcely come when the light was there again, again cast upon the ceiling. He abandoned the suitcase to pull the chair again to the window, speculating on what Craven was writing, the imagined words swirling about within his head, settling briefly, then swirling off. The words would, he realized, continue to spin about, continue to batter the insides of his head even after he had left the house. Better, he thought, to see the actual words, to read what was there on paper, to allow the words to set and solidify and thus sink lower in his head and be forgotten. The imaginative process can ruin a good head, he thought, and must be brought to a halt before it is too late. The actual was the only way to stop the whirligig of the possible. There seemed no choice but to once again read Craven.

  But when, and how, was one to go about it? It could not be done by night, for at night Craven was in the greenhouse himself, composing. Sindt could not simply ask Craven to show what he had written, for Craven had claimed not to to be writing at all. During the day, too, Craven came and went about the grounds and might well discover him as he forced his way into the greenhouse, particularly if there were more than one Craven. And where, too, was the chef? He had never seen the chef, but that did not mean that the chef had never seen him. Perhaps the chef was observing him even now.

  He finally settled on early in the morning, thinking it possible, perhaps, to sneak down the stairs and out to the greenhouse after Craven had left it, while Craven waited for him at the breakfast table.

  He slept, or tried to, through most of the night, finally jerking fully awake with the cold light of dawn. Having slipped on his socks, he slowly granched the door open. The stairway was empty. He made his way slowly down, turning around the narrow staircase, dragging his hand along the wall for balance. He crossed the hall carefully, eased the front door open, went out.

  The air was sharp, crisp. He could feel the prick of gravel through his socks. He picked his way carefully along the side of the house, crossed to the greenhouse.

  He peered in. The greenhouse was empty. Trying the handle, he found it locked, so he pressed his shoulder to the metal edging of the door and bore down. He could see the wall and door bulge, the metal grating against the glass, the lock slipping. And then the door burst open and he was in.

  He approached the simple desk, the chair. On the desk: two sheaves of paper, the one on the left higher, a pen between. He approached the leftmost, found the paper empty, blank, but of course Craven had always moved the paper from left to right.

  He approached the rightmost stack, found the top sheet blank. Turning it over, he found the reverse blank as well. He leafed down through the stack but there was nothing, no words, not a mark.

  When he turned he could see, through the ceiling of the greenhouse, the window of the tower. Through that window, distorted by both the glass of the window and the roof of the greenhouse, he glimpsed a figure. Perhaps Craven, he thought, Cravens, one of them. Or perhaps the cook. Don’t forget the cook. He had a feeling that everything had already occurred. The figure was looking down, he thought, looking at him.

  Not knowing what else to do, he turned from the gaze, sat down at the desk. He could guess what was expected of him. Picking up the pen, he began to write.

  After nearly ten months of struggling to write, he started. He continued writing uninterrupted until he again, both in prose and in life, found himself sitting in the greenhouse, pen in hand. He had, he realized, allowed himself to be used. Yet, nevertheless, I have now approached some sort of conclusion, he wrote. All that remains is for me to destroy this manuscript as well.

  Ninety Over Ninety

  I.

  During his tenure at Entwinkle House, Philip Kossweiller had purchased fiction that received stunning acclaim but hadn’t, to quote his boss, Vincenzo Darba, sold a good goddamn. Well, admitted the former publicity chief who insisted that everyone call him “Cinchy” and who enjoyed pronouncing himself “a boss of the people,” sure they had sold, but they hadn’t broken even. Well, sure they had broken even, but they hadn’t made much. Not enough to sneeze at anyway.

  “Think blockbuster,” Cinchy told Kossweiller. “‘Every book a blockbuster’: that’s your new motto.”

  “Blockbuster?”

  “No,” said Cinchy, jutting himself forward conspiratorily. “Wait a minute. Blockbu
ster isn’t enough for us. You and me, we’re not the sort satisfied with just blockbuster. Go for the three b’s.”

  “The three b’s?”

  “Big-ass blockbuster.”

  “That’s only two b’s.”

  “Big-ass. Block. Buster. Three b’s. No more of this literature crap. Sure, it’s good, but literature’s the icing on the cake. You don’t spread icing all over an empty plate, do you? What have you got to do before you spread the icing, Karsewelder?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Darba.”

  His boss gave him a look that seemed pained, slightly constipated. “Not Mr. Darba—Cinchy. You see,” said Cinchy, throwing his hands up, “that’s your problem. You have to bake the fucking cake first.”

  “What cake?”

  “Go bake the fucker,” said Cinchy, boss of the people, clapping Kossweiller hard on the back and pushing him out into the hall. “God help you, Karsewelder. Bring me something that sells for a change. Blockbuster!” he yelled after him.

  Back in his office, Kossweiller examined his fingernails, then tried to clean underneath them with his lower incisor. He stared at the pile of manuscripts on his desk, then went back to reading the typescript for Robert Barney’s O Fickle God, a “historical novel of the West” overladen with poorly veiled attacks on contemporary middle America. According to Barney’s agent, it was written in a “fluid, beautiful prose,” a stylistic strength that Kossweiller was having some difficulty locating. Perhaps this made it blockbuster material.

  Ole Zeke, like some poor misbegotten anthropophage, leaned a pace closer to the fire and spat, his spittlegob sizzling greedily in the cackling flame.

  “Seems to me,” said the old-timer [Why not ole-timer? Kossweiller wondered], “that your so-called advert-iss-ments haen’t more than a spit in the fire. Only yer middleminded are gone to ’tribute any importance to ’em.”

  Big Jim nodded, half to himself. The old guy was making a curious heap of sense! Who’d have thunk he’d come to understand his own city slicker’s world through the words of a stranger in the Savage West?

  He looked up to find Ole Zeke holding an open pouch toward him. “’Baccy?” the old-timer asked.

  Bogged down, Kossweiller abandoned the manuscript and left his office.

  Cinchy was at his desk, feet up, speaking loudly into the receiver to one of the stable of second-rate celebrities he published: an ex-president turned poet, a ’50s film star who wrote an exposé on his ’80s film-star daughter, a former TV evangelist’s wife turned blandly pseudo-Buddhist.

  Farther down, Tal Anders’s door was open, Anders himself staring at his computer screen. Kossweiller went in without knocking, sat down.

  “Who is it?” asked Anders, not turning.

  “Me,” said Kossweiller.

  “Koss,” said Anders. “I’m just on to something here. Absolutely the next big thing. Give me a minute.”

  “Want me to come back?”

  “No, no,” said Anders. “All I need’s a minute.”

  Kossweiller stood. He went over to the nearest bookshelf, read along the spines, removed a slim handsome volume at random. The Secret Lives of Housewives. The back copy read: Not just gossip and recipes for delicious cherry pie pass from one matronly hand to another…. Here, glimpsed through keyholes, the real hidden history of housewives in all its chaleur: high romance, lesbianism, bestiality, S&M, and every depravity imaginable, and yes, even a little tenderness….

  “You actually published this?” asked Kossweiller.

  “Published what?”

  “This.”

  Anders turned slightly. “That?” he asked. “Sure. Eight printings in cloth, still going strong in paperback.”

  “Is it any good?”

  “Define ‘good.’”

  “Is it worth reading?”

  “People want it,” said Anders. “They buy it. That’s good enough for me.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  Anders turned. “Koss, you’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “That’s what Cinchy thinks.”

  “Cinchy’s absolutely right,” said Anders. “You should listen to him. Remember: he may be a boss of the people, but he’s still the boss.” He turned his attention back to the computer screen. “Just a few seconds more.”

  Kossweiller sat down and stared at the back of Anders’s head.

  “I mean, why did you go into editing anyway?” Kossweiller asked.

  Anders shrugged. “You have to be philosophical about these matters. It’s not why you went in but how you stay in.”

  “That’s cynical.”

  “Philosophical, you mean,” said Anders. “Come on, Koss, lighten up.” He shook his fingers out, pushed his chair back away from the computer. “There,” he said. “Got him.”

  “Got who?”

  “What?” said Anders. “Only the biggest ex-KKK memoir in publishing history.”

  “Off the computer?”

  “From a chat room,” he said. “Ran into this guy attacking the fascists on Nazichat.com and got him to agree to write his book for us before the supremacists blocked him from the chat room. Fortunately, I was the only editor monitoring that particular list.”

  “Doesn’t it tell you something that you were the only editor logged on to Nazichat.com?”

  “Sure it does,” said Anders. “It tells me I’m the only one smart enough to sniff out the next big thing. Imagine this: you’re a KKK member, happily living out your dreams of white supremacy, maybe even involved in a few lynchings—of course, you’re not directly involved, or at least you won’t be once a good editor gets through with you—when Blammo! it hits you like a ton of lead.”

  “What hits you? Did you actually say ‘blammo’?”

  “You find out your grandfather was a Jew. Yes, blammo. Why not? I’ll say it again: blammo. So you give up the KKK, reform, and go to Israel to immerse yourself in your newly discovered heritage.”

  “Sounds like a bad TV movie.”

  “Exactly,” said Anders. “It’s sure to sell to TV. Cinchy’ll eat it up.”

  “Cinchy wants me to bake him a cake.”

  “A cake? Is it his birthday? I didn’t get him anything.”

  “‘You can’t spread frosting on an empty plate.’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a metaphor,” said Kossweiller. “You still remember metaphors, don’t you? It’s the best Cinchy can do. He wants me to stop publishing literature and start publishing blockbusters.”

  “But you don’t do blockbusters,” said Anders. “You’re the guy who does literature, who gives us respectability. You’re the eye candy.”

  “I’ve got to do at least one.”

  “So, do one then.”

  “What do I know about blockbusters? I don’t even know what sells.”

  “Look,” said Anders, spreading his arms wide. “Don’t think in terms of good or bad. Think accessibility. Think largest possible target audience. Knowing you, if you go against all your impulses, it’ll work.”

  •

  He called the agents he knew best, took them to lunch, told them that this time he was looking for something “really big.” But his reputation as a literary editor meant they interpreted “big,” no matter how he qualified it, as literary.

  Their best varied drastically. Raymond Knoebler of Knoebler & Goebler sent him the aging Thomas Johnson’s As a Boy One Read Kipling: A Literary Life; Jed Bunting passed along a copy of Sal Lazman’s The Slice, a literary golf novel; Sally Johnson offered a new posthumous collection of occasional pieces and a few stories by minimalist Roland Pilcher, a collection that Kossweiller suspected had been largely ghostwritten by Pilcher’s wife, a writer herself and a professional literary widow.

  Carolyn Kiff, however, sent him Albert West’s fourth book, En Masse, a novel of enormous scope and skill, so good that he knew it couldn’t possibly sell. Not enough to sneeze at anyway
. Cinchy would never sign off on it.

  He sent the manuscripts back, except the West, which he couldn’t bear to turn down. Perhaps if he could find one huge book, one real blockbuster, he thought, Cinchy would let him do the West as icing.

  Once he’d run through the agents he knew best, he approached those he generally shied away from. There was Claudia Bart, who offered him a chance for an unauthorized biography of George Clooney, but by the time, three hours later, he’d gained Cinchy’s approval, she regretted to inform him that she’d sold the book to a rival house. There was Robert J. Voss, who offered him a book about American one-hit-wonder bands, entitled Where Are They Now? Most of them were working at Wal-Mart, it turned out. Ducky Hawarth slid in wearing a spangly shirt to suggest Follies, a coffee-table book about dinner shows, musicals, and dancers, “done in three versions, one for each gender.”

  There were other books, some of which he made halfhearted offers on. But the day before the quarterly meeting, Kossweiller still had nothing in hand. There was only one lunch appointment left, with a somewhat frayed hustler named Ralph Bubber.