This Location of Unknown Possibilities

by Brett Josef Grubisic

  “Burning the candles at both ends isn’t really my, well, modus vivendi.” Marta studied the shifting expressions on Chaz’s thrill seeker’s face.

  “I’m not sure what that means, but, anyway, we’ll be back within an hour. I promise it’ll be relaxing. You’ll sleep better.”

  The man’s enthusiasm seethed potently. “Why not?” Marta imagined that an alert mind could kick-start spent limbs. “You have some tomato paste on your chin, by the way.”

  “I’ll be back in ten.” He rubbing his chin with a shirtsleeve. “I need to change out of these clothes.”

  “See you then. Shall I?” Marta’s gaze drifted toward the paper litter.

  “Allow me.”

  5.

  When Chaz returned just five minutes later, Marta noticed that he’d traded the day’s black jeans for a less faded pair; the black T-shirt featuring yellow lettering, “Bacon is My Fragrance,” led her to conclude he favoured duplicate purchases.

  “I’ll drive, okay?”

  “That’s a problem, sorry. The rental agreement’s for one driver.”

  “Driving is part of my job, so I’m excellent. Bend the rules a bit? Less tiring for you too.”

  “This once, alright.” A head-on crash in the dead of night seemed remote.

  The breeze that passed through the car grew moister but only slightly cooler and, Marta recognized, Thanksgiving savoury with grass stalks and sagebrush the further they drove from the irrigated orchard flats. Marta peered outside. Except where the twin headlight beams on the highway shone, little detail flourished, only road shoulders and the silhouette of trees—and, later, untended scrubland, choppy lake water, and fenced rolling fields—scarcely discernible from the night sky.

  “I read somewhere that for every kilometer one exceeds the speed limit, the probability of an accident rises two-fold,” she said, having read nothing of the kind.

  “Really?” Chaz accelerated slightly, features lit and exaggerated by the glowing red console display. “Interesting, I read something by Aldous Huxley once: ‘Who lives longer? The guy who takes heroin for two years and dies, or a man who lives on roast beef, something, something, till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. And all the years of the steak guy are lived only in time.’ Relax, ma’am, I’ve never even had a fender bender.”

  Marta returned to the barely revealed landscape. Though she could pinpoint her fatigue—muscles heavy, eyes dry, thoughts cluttered—the night cover energized her.

  Intently focused on the road’s frequent curves, Chaz didn’t ask questions or unreel anecdotes. At the crest of a long hill, he slowed, leaning close to the windshield. “We’re nearly there. I think so anyway.”

  Ordinarily comfortable with silence, Marta now sensed the need for conversation and struggled with a suitable topic. She glanced at the radio, but Chaz had switched it off pulling away from the Star-Lite. Only shop talk, which she hoped to avoid, presented itself.

  “So, what are your plans in the industry?” The words sounded flat, perfunctory.

  “Let’s not talk about work, okay?” he said. “It’s depressing, and besides I’m kind of into this drive. My pupils are dilated; I think darkness triggers adrenaline production or something. I’m alert like a jaguar or a blind person, you know what I mean?”

  “Yes, we could stop and hunt prey.”

  “Or howl at the moon.” He glanced out the side window. “Well, if there was one. Sometime, though, I’ll tell you all about my first job in the business, my foot-in-the-door story. At Cine/wurst Adult Studios. We had to pronounce it German-style, Cinevurst. ‘U dollar sign A’ was part of the name too, which no one knew how to pronounce. Sounds sleazy, eh?”

  “Yes, and definitely more intriguing than mine.” Involving a fatal mid-semester coronary and a suddenly open tenure-stream position, her success story made listeners uncomfortable, as though she’d cheated and personally served the man Mormon Tea to induce cardiac arrest and get ahead. Aside from that, she lacked riveting anecdotes. Graduate school tribulations invited only yawns outside of the ivory tower, Marta knew firsthand. And she felt unprepared for a public launch of her other rite of passage stories. Sadie’s adventures in pop culture would remain in cold storage for the time being.

  Chaz slowed at a stop sign. “Weird to have this out here in the absolute middle of nowhere.” Other than the immediate road and shoulders of dry tall grasses, they might be in deep space. “A reassuring outpost of law and order, I guess.”

  Marta, regretting the weak depth of field, peered outside for the furtive eyes of roving coyotes. Lulled by gentle bumps and turns and contented with the conversational hiatus, she leaned into the door and let drowsy eyes cease their work.

  6.

  Shortly after returning from Sadie’s abortive trial-run at the Boise conference, Marta had been struck by a continued restlessness as well as the inadequacy of the explanatory metaphor she’d come to use—Idaho hadn’t been a pressure valve, nor she a machine with a noxious buildup of steam. As for “an itch to scratch,” that she kept. Allowing time for the model description to coalesce, Marta settled on the tried-and-true in the meantime: figuratively, she was all dressed up with nowhere to go.

  And while conceding that an appearance as Sadie could be accomplished with ease in an off-the-grid city destination, or, even better, in the vast suburb spillover, the chance that she’d run into a colleague—or student: of the thousands she’d taught, surely restaurants had hired a handful or two—further cemented an already entrenched reluctance. The solution would be longer term, she concluded, paying closer attention to posters in departmental hallways and email announcements for conferences at universities in Trieste and Honolulu. She’d hold Sadie in suspension; and for now, of course, the unavoidable demands of teaching, grading, and publications took precedence.

  The Benefit of Risk, about which she wrote a hostile review that lambasted the author’s methodology (“paltry slapped atop abysmal,” the exact wording), would have been remembered as a demoralizing waste of paper if it hadn’t sparked the Holiday Archetype Personality manuscript—and provided Sadie with temporary new lodgings.

  The author’s thesis—a loud, dizzying barrage of MBA business-speak about venture capitalism coupled to a simple-minded, fascistic notion of evolutionary triumph—read as laughable drivel, but in its message of risk-taking she’d felt a timely nudge. “Starting Today, Nice Guys Don’t Finish Last™,” one of the author’s registered motivational speaker refrains, managed to give Marta pause.

  Over three months worth of weekends, Marta signed out volumes of well-used O Magazine—refusing altogether the purchase of a lone issue—and a complement of miscellaneous self-help and popular psychology bestsellers from the public library. She pored over the lot (amongst their number Nice Gals Finish Last?, written by someone with an alleged Ph.D. from a university she’d never heard of, and numerous variation-on-that-theme women’s magazine articles about breaking through the glass ceiling), pilfered the flimsy ideas, and redirected them; and she mimicked their tone, vocabulary, and penchant for pithy coinages for use in the extra-curricular project. Marta dabbled at the venture exclusively at home. While not a secret she’d take to the grave, neither did it represent the sort of prize endeavour worth mentioning to colleagues.

  Marta realized with surprise that the actual construction—breaking the book into segments, wholesale invention of plausible ideas for a pitiful audience—had not surpassed her abilities. Honing the jocular sales pitch tone became a true hurdle. The visionary’s persona required art; being neighbourly, trustworthy, folksy, and yet authoritative in print was no mean accomplishment. Marta persisted, eventually producing an acceptable facsimile. If she sent the manuscript out, months would pass before a reply; at that point and with a letter of unqualified offer, she’d have time to iron the patter smooth.

  She judged the end product to be
literary fool’s gold. A travesty or else a vapid parody of the genre, it also looked no different from cynical product. From the title onward, the thin manuscript existed as a con for the gullible, one whose very purpose transformed Marta from being a last-place-finish nice gal to a predator of the weak and foolish; both roles lacked in appeal. Pangs of apprehension pulsed across her abdomen.

  In the ruminative period between completing the manuscript and sending it off, she left the sheets in plain sight. Alone on the vintage yellow Arborite kitchen table, the papers and their implication could not be avoided. That constant visual cue forced a thoroughly deliberated choice: to act or not to act, that was the age-old question she returned to. Over those three weeks—a gestation period, she came to think of it—Marta toyed with diagnosis. She viewed The Holiday Archetype Personality as a shameful mutant, a monstrous birth of a disturbed intellect, a consequence of being overworked, living proof of a bookish woman’s variant of a nearing-middle-age crisis, a symptom of an unhealthy immersion in a competitive professional environment, and an empty lark. At last, she chastised herself—give it a rest.

  Tiring of one’s own quirks and neurotic tendencies was as easy as getting fed up with those of someone else, Marta believed, convinced of the drawbacks of the over-examined life. Wedged between narcissism and abject self-loathing, she extracted some comfort with the trick of using self-knowing to undermine her internal drive to fret and over-analyze. As far back as kindergarten her mother had chided her for “making a mountain out of a molehill.” Perhaps Marta didn’t possess self-awareness at all; she’d only internalized Dianne’s point of view. Sensing imminent, paralyzing uncertainty, Marta focussed on action.

  From those public library books she also selected a remote publisher whose tawdry range of bus reading and disposable bold-typeface titles—Must Love God!: Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Freak; The Coming Panic (& How to Profit from It); Marriage Secrets of the Alpha Delta Pi Sorority; Just Pray No: Finding True Love and Stopping Relationship Addiction Syndrome; The Oneida Community Diet—aligned perfectly with the market niche of the project. And if Apate+Global Publications of St. Petersburg, Florida eventually sent a kindly-worded rejection, she would file it away in the home desk’s Correspondence: History folder and recycle the manuscript. The entire effort would then be remembered as an ignoble experiment; and she’d forever consider The Benefit of Risk so complete a failure that even an idea it had inadvertently spawned amounted to four minutes of chewing for the paper shredder.

  Marta included sufficient return postage. Rejected or not she wanted the manuscript secure in her possession, disposal of the body always a crucial point.

  The book’s concept unfolded easily, simplicity necessarily the foundation. Intricate systems or any ideas that made demands, she’d discovered, were not part of the best selling self-help author’s stock of attributes. The lost, curious, or dejected didn’t care for and would not read Judith Butler syntax. Simple yet pithy—the trusty voice of common sense—became key, preferably with the promise of thundering Shakespearian or biblical profundity—love thy brother as thy self; to thine own self be true—but stripped of the antique, off-putting language, of course.

  “If every person has a favourite holiday and a seemingly natural affinity for it, that’s because holidays evolved in response to archetypal human traits,” she wrote in the enthusiastic letter to the publisher, deciding against an exclamation point in the draft’s final edit.

  The two-pager explained the basic schema—Halloween as Dionysian, Rabelaisian, festive, anarchic; Easter as introspective, melancholic, Thanatos-oriented, and so on. Before sounding too unappealingly academic and high-minded, or as flaky as a kaftan’d Santa Fe Jungian mystic draped in turquoise healing stones, the letter transitioned from the speculative overview toward what the Director of Sales would expect: practical, tangible, mass market, and salable applications. HAP’s qualities, she hoped, would jump of the page as fresh, relatable, and roundly marketable.

  Honing the pitch, Marta zeroed in and highlighted the zodiacal parallels: how each individual matched a basic type and possessed, moreover, an adjunct disposition, à la Aquarius rising, that could be calculated with ease. Readers could find self-improvement too. For these seekers, new awareness could lead to informed, perhaps life-altering decisions about career and romance. For good measure she added an Enneagram-ish healthy lifestyle component (yes, the functional Halloween archetype can be attained, and the commonplace dysfunctional kind might, with steady effort naturally, be rehabilitated) and provided an example of the romance tie-in: a Halloween person with Christmas rising ought to stand way clear of an Easter type, dysfunctional or otherwise.

  “HAPpiness in Your Grasp!” the bankrupt, virtually meaningless tag-line mentioned in the letter, eventually appeared on the book’s back cover. Typing it, she’d imagined the phrase appearing on a trademarked cosmetics ad, as empty and alluring as a bubble.

  On a par with the zodiac or tarot cards, the concept seemed sensible enough, especially if mental interrogation demanded mere circumstantial proof. Marta had heard people describe themselves as being a Christmas person or as loving Halloween. Some, she figured, would be reassured about the cosmic and fateful explanation for that fondness: “Oh goodness, no way, we’re both Easters!”

  While polishing the hopeful soft sell, Marta ran into a snag: what name to sign?

  Clearly, the wrong choice would be Marta Spëk, Ph.D. Besides the obvious reasons—the manuscript’s appalling bad faith, the titanic lack of merit—Marta understood that any faculty trolling the mass market in unabashed pursuit of commercial success would be regarded as ethically compromised and sullied, equivalent to a monk on a talk show circuit or hawking knives on a shopping channel. Not that she would be publicly shamed—she was no Hester Prynne and, in fairness, only a handful of her colleagues could be labeled dour Puritans. Even so, Marta freely believed she’d detect the sulphurous tang of smug unspoken judgment—At what price tawdry fame, whore?

  Until Sadie’s reappearance, Marva Longknife and Hortensia Propp—names courtesy of a random literary name generator website—rivaled one another high on the shortlist. Stepping off the campus-bound bus one morning, she discarded them. Sadie glimmered perfectly, of course. Marta had come to view Sadie as a fond middle name, a part of her complete identity, if never used. When the time arrived to append a family name to Sadie, Lightbody materialized, like a stubborn memory disinterred by a hypnotist. The name’s unthreatening and airily visionary undertone sounded right for HAP, and when Marta thought of the faint but sinister echo with Lucifer, she judged it a weird coincidence, one nobody would spot.

  Sadie Lightbody made her first public appearance as a signature. For an authentic touch, Marta used a left hand to sign Sadie’s name. Sadie would remain unlettered, Marta decided, street wise and intuitive rather than book smart, a distant cousin of Angel’s Mae.

  With the adoption of a new pen name, Marta thought that a laissez-faire, just-do-it attitude would serve best. The exotic and reckless choice had a singular appeal: it was so atypical. She resisted the mores of civility—good will, integrity, sincerity, honesty—in favour of the wild, nature-sanctioned amorality of The Benefit of Risk: capitalize on the thoughtless organicism of the market, survival and dominance of the fittest, and so on. That bracing shift in perspective gave her permission to drop the manuscript in the department’s Mail Out basket.

  Apate+Global’s letter of acceptance stressed the publisher’s commitment to Sadie’s enterprising vision. Later emails also recycled words—monetize, incentivizing—and the phrase “capitalize on holiday buying season opportunities” with machine regularity. A+G rushed the manuscript to print, though not before first trimming the “fat,” material the editor had drawn Xs through: arrows to cutting felt pen remarks on the margins identified problems: “obscure” and “$2 words” and “egghead.” Marta insisted on not making the changes; seeing the relative truth in
the adage about leopard spots, she replied to say that market-readiness ought to be left in the hands of A+G’s in-house editorial team.

  Before signing the contract Marta explained the need for anonymity. Pseudonyms were a dime a dozen in this industry of lifestyle experts, the Spirituality and Self-Improvement Editor told her over the phone. The press accepted Sadie Lightbody, and both sides agreed that Ms. Lightbody’s chronic aversion to public appearances added mystique. The seclusion would be good for business—millennia worth of seers had taught the public to expect a masked sibylline cave dweller, or at least an introvert with a great reluctance to bathe in limelight.

  A+G updated her with emails about the book’s “cleaning up” over the buying season. By late spring the product run flat-lined. Not uncharacteristic, Holiday Archetype Personality circulated fleetingly, a flash in the pan—her mother’s phrase, dredged up unexpectedly. Marta felt tugs of sadness and relief with the subsiding of Sadie’s presence on the popular culture landscape. However many barriers between the limelight and herself she’d insisted on manufacturing, Marta couldn’t deny enjoying degrees of its luxurious warmth.

  Even at moments of ethical entanglement—reading but never daring to compose replies to aching letters from Carol S. in Atlanta or Shirley V. (hailing from Milk River, a town in Alberta so small that Marta had opened an atlas to confirm its existence)—she pinpointed tingles of pleasure upon receipt of letter bundles and forwarded emails that arrived with requests from A+G to reconsider a publicity tour. Amidst deep sighs and muttered complaints about the effort, the lady doth protest too much, methinks never slid far from her tongue’s tip.

  Marta didn’t succumb to the temptation of taking Sadie Lightbody on the road. Savouring the idea of the adventure was satisfactory enough.

  A+G sent word about the “mother of all PR events” for a contingent of their authors, the Sacramento Psychic & Well-Being Lifestyles Fair. Like all other colossal opportunities, Marta turned it down as recklessness incarnate: one oversight, a single random moment would tear down her house of cards. The Fair’s coinciding with the semester break wormed into her brain; she flew to San Francisco, splurged on a sporty coupe (asking, in Sadie’s stead, for royal blue, but settling for black), and wandered around, an anonymous face in a teeming crowd of believers.