I cut the story out of the magazine and have taken it with me to every treatment since. Will you write more about her? I feel that I need to know what happens—if she survives, what her life is like after.
Reading the letter, Richard was able to imagine the woman clearly, in the same way he had once been able to imagine characters for stories. He couldn’t put words to the feeling, that surprising connection, but she already had, and so he saved the letter. He began to receive others. A housewife who had just discovered that her husband of twenty-five years was cheating on her; a physics professor terrified of leaving his house; a boxer whose childhood friend had just suffered a series of strokes. They had read his stories and understood what he was creating, the void he was circling, those ineffable feelings from back in his mother’s hospital room. They understood how Richard had taken those emotions and blown them up to a scale so large that he and his readers could look at them directly, like a safe angle when staring into the sun.
He saved the letters inside a folder on his writing desk. He brought them along to every convention and junket and premiere. Untouched, usually, but present, there if he needed them. When he doubted his ability or methods, he opened one, his eyes running across the familiar handwriting, the lines he’d long since memorized. He began to think of them as his anchor, his foundation. Toward the end of his marriage, when Victoria was nearly frantic with rage, she hadn’t threatened to destroy his manuscripts or awards, the movie posters signed by famous actors. It was the folder she threatened, aiming the can of lighter fluid at his precious pages and threatening to squeeze, to strike a match.
Many times over the years, he had tried to write stories on his own again, without his growing collection of magazines and paperbacks. Jolted by guilt, or fear of discovery, like a drunk jumping back on the wagon. He tried after his first collection was published, and he started giving interviews, answering questions. He tried again when Victoria moved into the house in St. Petersburg, the year before their wedding, and Richard feared that she would open some of the dog-eared books and magazines in his sunroom office and recognize characters, lines of dialogue, turns of phrase. And he tried whenever he heard from his father, when he received those infrequent, increasingly disoriented phone calls from California, the old man tearily reminding Richard of how much his mother had loved his stories, how much they had meant to her.
During those times he boxed up his collection, cleared the room and sat at his desk, his notebook open to a blank page. But the page never became less blank, and Richard could feel himself slipping, disappearing back into that void. Months or a year would go by before he was able to claw his way up to working again, reopening those boxes, his books and magazines, finding a first sentence, then the next, finally regaining his sense of himself. Months lost, a year lost, swearing that he would never try again, never go back, slip away, disappear.
It turned out that his fears were unfounded. The questions from interviewers never probed very deeply; the movie people never asked any questions at all. Victoria rarely set foot in the sunroom. She didn’t care about his work methods, only the royalty statements, their status at the country club, the flights to the west coast for Hollywood premieres.
Richard was the only one who cared, he was his only judge, and he realized, finally, that no justification was necessary. Did architects mix their own cement, shape their own bricks? Did every painter grind his own pigments? Answering his own questions alone in the sunroom, while Victoria was at tennis, at the salon.
What about jazz musicians, who quoted from one another mercilessly, stealing riffs and chord progressions?
No one calls that theft. We call it art.
So what was this?
“Richard?”
He turned from the window. The PR girl, Amanda, Annie, leaned into the suite’s doorway, her face in the frame, mouth pulled low in an apologetic frown.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve got one more, remember? That grad student. After her, you’re done, I promise.”
“Let’s get a drink then,” Richard said, straightening. The void was always threatening; always needed to be held at bay. “Just the two of us,” he said. “In celebration of a hard day’s work.”
The PR girl nodded, her lips rising in a satisfying smile, pulling him back, just a step or two, from the edge.
* * *
“I’d like to show you some research my group has been working on.”
The grad student’s name was Lydia. Richard had no problem remembering her name, which struck him as odd, as most everything else about her was unremarkable. She was the same age as the PR girl, but with pallid, unsunned skin and unfashionable glasses that matched her flat brown hair. A woman who spent her time indoors, he thought, staring at screens. She seemed nervous, touching her index finger to the ball of her nose before asking a question, as if it were a button that needed to be pushed before she could speak.
She had the usual inquiries—Why only short stories? Where do you get your ideas?—and Richard gave his usual answers. Her reactions to his responses were flat like her coloring. She seemed uninterested in his answers; it was as if these questions were merely a formality.
But now, opening her laptop, she straightened a bit. Her face and body lifted, infused with a new energy. This was what she had been waiting for. She wanted to show her work. She wanted his advice, his approval.
Lydia paused, the laptop screen still obscured. “I want you to know,” she said, “that I’ve read your work my whole life. My father died when I was six, and I became a reader to escape.”
She paused for a moment, clearly uncomfortable. She blinked and touched the tip of her nose again, which seemed to help her continue.
“At least, I thought that’s why I read. But your stories—these stories—weren’t just an escape. They seemed like an echo of my own thoughts, my feelings. I’ve carried them with me ever since.”
Richard sat forward on the sofa. There was something about her—her intelligence, her suddenly exposed vulnerability—that made him want to tell her about his mother, show her the folder of letters. Strange, he thought—it was not so much a desire for admiration, and there was no physical desire here on his part. He simply wanted her to know. She seemed like another reader who might understand.
“Anyway,” she said, embarrassed, flushing with the first show of color. “My work.”
“Of course,” Richard said, smiling, trying to put her back at ease. “Show me.”
* * *
Richard’s father had spent the last years of his life in a nursing home just north of Santa Clarita, slipping deeper and deeper into a dementia that riddled his memory, his sense of time and actuality. Whenever Richard visited, his father rattled off long strings of detailed memories that had never happened, but Richard felt it was his job to confirm that they had, that he remembered those things, too. This seemed to make his father happy, or at least content. His father’s real memories were gone, or buried. He no longer mentioned Richard’s mother, or their lives together in the house in Santa Clarita, the stories Richard had once told on their drives to school. Instead, his father recounted new names, places, events, all in the greatest detail, with the greatest emotion, his eyes wet with remembrance.
Richard hadn’t spoken at his mother’s funeral. He was too young, too grief-stricken. But two years ago, when his father finally succumbed, Richard felt the need to memorialize the man with whom he’d spent those empty years after his mother’s death. He had been unable to understand his father then, his silence, his inward turn, and over the following decades their relationship remained strained and distant. But witnessing his father’s slow loss of engagement with reality had reminded Richard of his own loss, that first tumble into the void, and this evoked such a feeling of sympathy, of admiration for the stoic courage the old man had displayed in the face of his wife’s death, his perseverance in raising his son alone, that Richard was driven to write a memorial, a speech that would not only recall hi
s father’s best qualities, but that would help make sense of his newfound appreciation for the man, untangling the silent mysteries of those years they had spent alone together.
For two days he worked at his desk, in his notebook, ignoring calls from friends, his publisher, Victoria’s lawyer. But on the morning before the service, his notebook pages were still blank. Finally he capitulated, and spent the remainder of the day at the library’s microfiche machine, reading through a century’s worth of obituaries, hastily crafting his own from the pieces that seemed most authentic and apt. At the service, he stood at the lectern and delivered a eulogy that left most of the mourners in tears. But as he shook hands and accepted condolences and commendations his secret failure grew within him, a shadow-self Richard could feel in every nerve and muscle, pulling him back into the void.
He had floated there these last two years, gasping in the dark. It was the announcement of the new movie that had pulled him out, the first billboards and TV teasers, like a voice, his own voice remembered, finally calling him back.
* * *
“It’s an information retrieval system,” Lydia said. “Lines of code that will eventually read everything there is to read.”
Richard looked at the spreadsheet displayed on Lydia’s laptop. It made no sense. The screen was filled with rows and columns of what looked like snippets of phrases, clauses, lines of dialogue.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking up from the screen. “But what does this have to do with my work?”
“The system catalogs and then cross-references,” she said.
“Cross-references what?”
“Duplications,” she said. “Repetitions.”
This had been a mistake. Letting his vanity get the better of him, he’d probably wasted so much time that his drink with the PR girl wouldn’t come to pass. But maybe if he excused himself now, before Lydia went any further, he could still salvage some of the—
“Over the course of your career you’ve written seventy-seven stories,” Lydia said. “And every one contains material copied directly from other sources.”
Richard felt the air-conditioning on his skin again, working its way below the fabric of his shirt, prickling the hairs on his arms, the back of his neck. He tried to speak but his throat had dried shut.
“In many of them,” Lydia said, “the percentages were the highest my research team has ever seen. Seventy-five, eighty percent, taken directly from other novels and stories, all previously out of print.”
Richard looked away from Lydia, down to her recorder, the little black box on the coffee table. He imagined her voice passing her lips and then pausing in the room for him to hear, to process, before traveling into the recorder’s microphone, its flash drive, the entire works no bigger than a thumbprint, where her voice would be coded, where it would remain, along with his, for all to hear, forever after.
He wanted to run, to stand and flee the room, but he stayed seated on the couch. Her voice, the black box, like magnets.
* * *
All that week before the junket, he’d been caught in the first swells of the new story, the rush of inspiration he feared he would never feel again. He had spent rich, glorious hours in the musty stacks of antiquarian bookshops, the basements of far-flung library branches, the open-air stalls of flea markets and swap meets. Some of the books he found hadn’t been borrowed since the Ford administration, were inscribed to friends and lovers during World War II or Korea. Many bore unidentifiable stains on the covers, carried silverfish in their latter chapters. All had been forgotten, discarded, sitting on shelves now, in soft piles, damp boxes, waiting.
He had filled an extra suitcase with his discoveries, gladly paying the weight surcharge before boarding the plane to Palm Springs. On the flight, he was already reassembling the sentences he had found. He could see them as if they were still on their original pages, their positions within paragraphs, the snug families where they had sat for half a century or longer. Then he could see their removal, the blank spot they left, and their combination with other sentences from other stories on a fresh page, clean and white. Arriving at the hotel he’d gone straight up to his suite, ordered a bottle and opened his suitcases and locked the doors, assembling the puzzle in his notebook, moving from books to magazines and around again, circling the bedroom, a glass of rye in his hand, a conductor signaling his players, combining the disparate lost sounds into a new piece, cutting, adding, rearranging until it felt right, settling into place, as if this was the way it always should have been, as if this was the story as it was meant to be told.
* * *
Finally, he met her eyes. There was more color in them than he had originally thought, lavender highlights that caught the last of the day’s sun. Lydia held them there for a moment, staring back, then dropped her gaze to the laptop.
“This passage from your story ‘Thalassa’ is identical to this passage from ‘The Cave of Memory’ by H. H. Burden,” Lydia said, “published in 1937. Everything except the character names, which came from another story published a year later.”
She moved her cursor around the screen, dragging a highlight across the familiar sentences.
“They let you in here,” Richard said. “The PR girl—Annie, Abigail—”
“Audrey,” Lydia said. “I told her I was a reader, that I’d devoted my work to yours. I told her the truth.”
He looked away again. The late afternoon sun sent a low slant of light across the carpeting, up the side of the couch. Richard moved his fingertips into its path, but felt none of its warmth on his skin.
“At first I thought that there must be something wrong with the program,” she said. “I thought that I was wrong.”
He stood. He didn’t know why he was standing. To scare or dismiss her? To run?
“But it turns out I’d been lied to. All of us”—she gestured to the room, the rooms beyond, below—“have been lied to.”
He needed to say something, to explain himself. He needed to tell her about the telethon, his first trip to Los Angeles, standing onstage, telling a story, the ringing phones off to the side, the clacking of the tote-board total behind him.
“We’re going public with our research tomorrow,” Lydia said. “But I wanted to give you an opportunity to respond before publication.”
He needed to tell her about the letters, the connection they proved, what they meant to him.
She turned the laptop back around, positioned her hands over the keys, thin fingers bent, ready to type.
He needed to tell her about his mother’s hospital room, her hand in his, the void. But the words wouldn’t come. Such a familiar feeling. Instead he said, “You’re going to take all of this away,” understanding as soon as the words left his mouth that she thought he meant the suite, the movie, the PR girl.
Lydia looked back down at her screen.
“It was never yours to begin with,” she said.
* * *
After Lydia had left the suite, Richard stood alone at the windows. It seemed as if he could feel the news traveling through the building below him, down its spine like a lit fuse, into the other suites of actors, producers, the director and screenwriter. The hotel was a charged weapon now, ready to detonate. He could imagine it collapsing, coming down around him. He could imagine what it would feel like to be trapped, pinned beneath.
He left his books, his notebook, the folder of letters in the bedroom and walked from the hotel, into the night world of the desert city, windows bright with electric light, lawns glittering with stolen water. He was never able to imagine anything further of his stories after he’d finished them, but walking alone along the broad boulevards and even sidewalks, the level fabrication of the place, he could picture what the city might be like on the desert planet of his story, of their movies. He was walking through it now; it was all around him.
After a while he lay down on a grassy berm beside a cinderblock wall. He was tired in a way he’d never felt before. Closing his eyes, he coul
d hear the wind, a banshee wail rushing down from the mountains. In his dream he was in a medical clinic, was a woman sitting in a medical clinic, a room full of ticking machines. His body, her body, had turned murderous, and so they were pumping her full of poison. She could feel it flooding her system, killing off the old version of herself. She was turning into something new now, half-human, half-chemical, her body bright and dark with it, nearly bursting with fear and hope.
In the first pale light of day he walked to a diner at the edge of the city. A bell over the door rang as he entered. It was a newer place, or had been restored from an older place. The paint was fresh, the vinyl on the booths shiny and smooth. He sat on a stool at the counter. After a while a waitress joined him from the other side. She was tall, middle-aged, with an unsteady gait, toddling a little as she moved from station to station. A muscle issue maybe, or an old injury. He ordered coffee and sat and drank, not realizing that the waitress was still there, speaking to him. She said he looked like he’d had a hell of a night.
The coffee had sloshed a little when she’d poured, and he looked down to the counter, the dark liquid line spreading slowly, diverted by the nicks and chips in the Formica.
“This is original,” he said, tapping the counter. The waitress nodded, but his thoughts were still down in the cracks and divots, their feel on his fingertips, the same as the counter in his mother’s diner back in Santa Clarita where he had spent so many afternoons, perched on a stool, telling her stories during the lull before the dinner rush. This crack is a mighty river, navigated by brave explorers. This divot is a volcano, hiding a great secret, a monster of enormous power and size.
The waitress asked his name. There in the void he didn’t know where the name came from, it was just there suddenly, and so he grabbed it, said it as if it were his own, as if it were true, and then the waitress nodded, accepting, and it was true. She asked where he was from, and he answered with the first city that came into his head, and now there was weight behind the name: a place, a history, the beginnings of a life. The waitress refilled his coffee and continued asking questions, so he continued answering, reaching, climbing, telling her the story as it came.
A Perfect Universe Page 16
