Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  Far off, near the Rheinfall, where colored panes of glass in a small booth double for the colored searchlights of Niagara, a pool of sticky liquid oozed and oozed, and in the booth an Israeli spy and a girl from the Shetland Islands lay curled up together, sleeping quietly. It was around four A.M., and they had hitchhiked that day from Feldkirch. Her name was Mary, and whether she knew that he was an Israeli spy, I don’t know. She was ordinary looking, and he was ennobled only by his possession of certain distinctive eyeglasses, which Zohar calls “vain Ashkenazi glasses,” oval with wire rims. Mary had noticed that he could read without them—perhaps that was her first clue that he was a spy. They had met the day before at a roulette table. She was drinking, and losing heavily . . . he took her elbow and offered to buy her another drink. Into it he slipped a tablet of vitamins B1 through B12. She saw him do it and asked why.

  “I don’t know,” he said somewhat bashfully. “I was brought up to think men should be mysterious and aggressive both at the same time, which is a bit of a contradiction, since mystery involves a holding back, a withdrawal, so I had this idea of giving women vitamins without their consent and then maybe giving them a hard time if they don’t like it, but actually you’re the first one to notice.” He was a living embodiment of Israel itself—its violent machismo, its shy longing for general approval. While he spoke he tried desperately to remember everything he knew about the Shetland Islands. Ponies, that was it. Extremely small ponies. But how small? He punched a quick query into the web browser he wore on his wrist, disguised as a wristwatch, and came up with a world record height, fully grown, at the shoulder, of three hands one inch—that is to say, thirty-two centimeters. How could such tiny animals work in coal pits? What brute would expect something like that to pull a wagon loaded with slag or ore or whatever it is they have in mines, or even a very small cart with just oranges, or even eggs? His heart filled with pity, and as Mary looked up, she saw his look of tender sorrow and realized that they would definitely sleep together at some point, probably very soon, assuming he wasn’t with somebody. She took a look around.

  “Did you ever see The Secret of Roan Inish?” she asked. “That’s a really great movie, about islands in Ireland where they believe some women are actually silkies, these seals that put away their skins for a while and take on human form.”

  “Are you one?” the spy asked. His name, as you may have guessed, was Avner Shats. No, really it was Yigal.

  “Actually I’m one of those mermaid people, and every step I take is like walking on sharp knives. Maybe I should lie down.” She led him to her room upstairs. As she turned off the light he noticed a large, furry, damp skin hanging over the back of a chair.

  Yigal had trouble sleeping that night. He was worried about the turn his spy operation would soon take. He got up to inspect the sealskin. It smelled musky and the inside was thick with cold, gelatinous fat. His operation called for the utmost in discretion and daring. He had to locate the heir to the Israeli throne and kill him.

  The next night, as they lay oblivious in a booth near Schaffhausen, a Trident missile had fallen through my coffee table, shuffling a few papers, and detonated in Yigal’s office. The significance of this was not immediately clear, but was widespread and started a sort of chain reaction, complicating Yigal’s life in ways he could not have anticipated. For one, he had kept his insurance policies in his desk—not a bright idea. But the complications were slow in emerging, and had little effect on his state of mind as he lay dozing on the slippery concrete next to a beautifully ordinary-looking Shetland girl.

  “Ordinary looking” in romantic fiction of this kind denotes a certain understated classic beauty. Mary’s flaw was her hair, which was on the frizzy side and what they call “dishwater blond.” Her skin was slightly yellow so that the red spots she got when running around outside in cold weather made her look better instead of worse, and she had stubby fingers. But none of that really mattered anyway, since she was really a silkie, and had quietly shipped her sealskin ahead to London by way of the concierge.

  CHAPTER 2

  IF THERE IS AN HEIR TO THE ISRAELI throne, it follows that he must be located where all other such long-lost items are located: the Great Library of Alexandria.

  There is a certain sort of drunk who, once loaded on martinis, begins to reminisce about the Great Library. “Of all the works of Euripides, we have only those beginning with the letters A and B,” the drunk says, a long ash from his cigarette falling to his right knee. With the heel of his hand, unconsciously, as from long habit, he rubs the ash into his pants. When I was an undergraduate, these drunks were already in their fifties, and unless well-fed and cared for by long-suffering wives, they were not destined to live much longer.

  In the late 1970s a younger generation of drunks, heavily influenced by a book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, began to take their place. The book proposed that modern man, beginning around the time of Camus, had achieved a level of self-consciousness previously impossible. The Aufhebung came about not in the traditional manner of pure spirit coming to know itself à la Hegel and Marx, but by actual mechanical means: The brain’s two halves had been brought into communication for the first time by the growth of a little wad of tissue.

  The first person to introduce the bicameral mind theory to me was not a drunk per se, but rather a tall, fat, bearlike schizophrenic, whose endorsement could recommend the theory to no one. He would sit in my dorm room for hours at a time, attempting to train me in ESP. Still, before long it was common knowledge among younger scholars that the ancient Greeks had not possessed self-awareness in any form. The professors explained it like this: In the works of Homer, people are always getting limbs chopped off, and they don’t seem very upset about it, somewhat as though they weren’t quite sure whose limbs those had been in the first place. A limbless Greek would just lie there wiggling in a state of naive confusion until his psyche, which just means “breath,” demonstrating that the Greeks didn’t even have a word for self-consciousness—more evidence that they lacked it—left his mouth for good.

  The approach could be fruitful for our understanding of Homeric epic if we equate the siege of Troy with the electric current to a cage floor, as in the following commonly performed psychology experiment: If you put a rat in a cage with an electric floor and shock him every time he presses the lever that used to release his food, he’ll just stand there pressing the lever and shrieking in pain until you stop. However, if you cut his brain down the middle and start over, he’ll be able to let go of the lever right away.

  Some say that the attics of certain Eastern monasteries contain treasures yet unknown, and were they accessible to scholars, the Great Library’s loss might not be felt so deeply. Many questions that now trouble scholars could be illuminated: Why, in Genesis 1:2, is the “wind” of God said to “brood” on the water like a chicken? Who did the ancient Greeks resemble more, rats or robots? Which race really descended from the Khazars, and who is the current king of the Jews? What went on in Euripides’ works whose titles began with gamma, delta, etc.?

  The notion of lost, irreplaceable cultural treasures always reminded Yigal of a book he had seen one night in the window of a shop on Allenby: Runts of 61 Cygni C, “where one-eyed runts play endless games of sex.” When he returned the next day intending to buy it, it was gone, and he suddenly realized that his girlfriend, for whom he had intended it as a birthday present, would not have found it nearly so funny. For years afterward, he was haunted by memories of the slim, yellow, small-breasted runts hiding among spears of pampas grass, their long-lashed eyes big as dinner plates.

  In accordance with his training, he set about his mission by applying the techniques of disinterested scientific analysis: The likely pretender to the Israeli throne, he reasoned, would be a direct descendant in the male line from the last really popular king. Allowing for mutations here and there, the Y chromosome ought to be the same. Now, as the Tomb of King David lies
just outside the Old City of Jerusalem, guarded only by a lopsided stack of paper yarmulkes on a table, obtaining a DNA sample was not a big challenge for an experienced operative like Yigal.

  After that he wasn’t so sure what to do. The logical next step, to collect a swatch of hair from every living male on earth, would surely compromise project secrecy. But a confession to his superiors that he had no chance of success would compromise job security, and I think it was this last concern that accounted for Yigal’s lying so peacefully in the wet, a little hungry after a meager dinner of chocolate bars, on the floor of a booth above the misty falls of the Rhine.

  Mary stirred in her sleep and woke briefly. She gave him her cheek to kiss, then suddenly rolled over, poking him in the stomach with her elbow and covering her legs with his coat so that he now had no blanket at all. He stood up to look out at the falls, his clammy hands jammed into his pants pockets. Suddenly he took out his wallet and began counting his money. He kept remembering the sealskin.

  As this reconstruction of Sailing Toward the Sunset begins to meander, I realize I should be making a greater effort to remain faithful to my original, whose second chapter begins:

  I entered the swimming pool, whose floor gleamed with cleanliness. A literary atmosphere, in slow stages, in the room [illegible] lined with white suede. . . .

  Meanwhile, on his knees, Zohar struggled to untangle the motorized front cable of his 1971 Land Rover, currently lodged firmly in the wet borax of a valley floor deep in the trackless interior of Bhutan, where to his weary eyes the flats appeared to stretch on indefinitely. Yet he knew these were the most forgiving of the many toxic marshes he must cross before reaching a serviceable airstrip, itself only the first stop of dozens on his way to Kathmandu, should he survive. Air service in Bhutan is by U.S. Army surplus C-130 cargo plane; there is no heat or pressurization, and the passengers may sit, if they choose, only in wooden folding chairs, several of which are stacked against the walls. Most prefer to huddle in their sleeping bags on pallets, walking around the aircraft not being advisable due to the chance of slipping on the rafts of spelt grains and quinoa that litter the floor by the millions, generally aft during takeoff and generally forward during landing. For sanitary reasons the transport of live animals is forbidden.

  The idea with the cable is that even if you’re stuck in a foot of wet salt, or, like Zohar, in a mixture of borax, gypsum, and quicklime, you can pull yourself along pretty well by wading out a few dozen yards in front of the Rover and pounding in a steel post with a sledgehammer. Then you throw the cable over it and crank yourself forward. Crossing Bhutan in this fashion could take a good long while and end up looking a lot like the movie Lifepod, or my other favorite, where the nineteenth-century Swedes try to reach the North Pole by balloon, but Zohar didn’t have to cross all of Bhutan—just enough to reach the airfield.

  The Swedish movie ends with the prime mover, the one who seduced his sweet and gentle best friends into dying slowly of cold and trichinosis, standing alone on a desolate beach and screaming. He knows his body will never be found, because there is no one left to pile rocks on it.

  It really happened—thirty-three years later someone found all of it: the piles of rocks and packets of undelivered letters and undeveloped photographs. For months (the balloon didn’t last very long) they headed north on pack ice that was drifting south. They wanted to see the North Pole. Then winter came. There was nothing to eat but polar bears. When the ice began to drift again in the spring, there was a big argument. The leader wanted to float south and look for whaling ships, but the others wanted to die on land so that the letters would be found one day. Then their wives would see that they really loved them, and that they regretted their terrible mistake.

  Back in Tel Aviv, the Trident had disrupted phone service and I couldn’t get a dial tone until late morning. When finally I was able to get online, I found a message from Shats that had been waiting for me since the beginning of the summer, before I went down to Eilat.

  I had gone to Eilat for the same reason everyone else goes—to make a quick buck. Nowhere else in Israel can endless days of sweltering heat, ruled by a sun which raises red, then purple, then yellow blisters under the shoulder straps of visiting Scandinavians and toasts darker skins to a mottled pattern of ashen wrinkles, be turned so easily into tax-free, black-market day labor. Towering luxury hotels line the beach, but behind them in the foothills is a demimonde of cosmopolitan flophouses whose inhabitants earn just enough to soak themselves inside and out in beer between bouts of petty squabbling over cots and towels and switchblade duels over drugs and women. They gather every evening around the hostels’ blaring TVs to compare notes on the best ways of coming into money.

  “Cucumbers,” I was told (they are paid by the bushel and can be quite large), but I chose instead customer service in the eerie submarine realm of Sissy and her ilk. In my years as an adept of the Dolphin Star Temple in Mount Rainier, Maryland, I had learned the importance of dolphin-like movements and attitudes in the attainment of true spiritual harmony, and my first glimpse of Nachum, helmsman of the glass-bottomed skiff later damaged by the missile that wiped out Yigal’s hard drive, was enough to convince me that he alone, of the Israelis I had met, truly understood dolphins. His skin was the shiny, streaked burnt umber of Naugahyde bus upholstery, yet through it a network of broken veins showed pink as coral, proving that it was not in Nachum’s nature to be dark brown but rather the result of his conscious control of the inner workings of his own body. I apprenticed myself to Nachum as to a master, learning like him to think only of the moment, of my own delicate skin and its need for moisture, and of fish. Whenever Nachum felt too warm, he would dive from the boat into the Gulf of Aqaba, framed by the distant white apartment houses and palm trees of Jordan, emerging after a minute or two to let the clinging droplets cool his skin for as much as five seconds at a time before they dried to a salty protective crust. The tourists and I, shaded by hats and with legs like stalks of rhubarb above our bobby socks, would applaud as he pirouetted through the crystalline water, his playful splashes dappling the rainbow slick of oil that trailed behind us like a streamer and luring Sissy, and sometimes her entire family, with a faithful impression of many fish dying together in agony. “Meep, meep!” we would all cry together in an ecstasy of interspecies communication. “I want to have my baby in the water with the dolphins,” one young woman or another would invariably say, which struck me as an uninformed wish, since even a whiff of urine can draw great white sharks from miles off, but I never objected aloud.

  Mary would certainly have laughed audibly, with her characteristic stifled giggle, one hand almost covering her mouth. She woke again and looked up at Yigal.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, offering him a small corner of his own jacket as an enticement to lie down.

  “I just remembered something,” he said. “I have to be in Tel Aviv by Friday.” He looked at his watch.

  “Are you cold?” She bunched up his coat, handed it to him, and shivered. She missed the thick, cozy layer of blubber that now lay neatly rolled on dry ice in a Styrofoam picnic cooler in the hold of a ferryboat by Ostend.

  He watched a bat fly over as he turned out his pockets, looking for something. The sky was turning blue with one brown edge. Finally he wrote a few words on the back of a business card and set it facedown by Mary’s head. “Call me if you get to Tel Aviv sometime.” He walked away, thinking he might take a room for several weeks in Biel. Mary began to cry.

  Thus it happened that Mary learned of the Trident missile impact almost two weeks before Yigal did.

  Shats’ message was about chapter one. I want to tell you about the breasts. I’m not really a breast man. My favorite part of the female anatomy is the . . . , he wrote.

  Being busy trying to write, Shats continued, I never thought about what it’s like to be someone else’s subject matter. Turns out it’s kind of fun, especially when the other writer avoids describing me as, say, a fat-asse
d smug. . . . Also, I like being a hero in a novel where I wear rounded glasses and sleep with a silkie from Shetland (the missing element in the GIF animation is a seal). “Yigal” is my brother’s name, and Yigal Schwartz (rhymes with Shats) is the literature lecturer who got me the $5,000 prize.

  But I’m really tired of discussing my book, he added. I was afraid I’d have to talk about it in the media, but apparently I’m safe, no one takes much interest. I was told someone reviewed the book on the radio and killed it. He said something like, “Behind it all there’s just a big empty void.” I didn’t hear it. I was wondering beforehand whether I’d like to read the reviews. I thought yes, but now I’m not sure. I prefer not to know.

  I replied by sending him chapter two.

  CHAPTER 3

  YIGAL’S FIRST RIDE DROPPED HIM AT the entrance to Herisau, in Canton Appenzell. A stone footpath led into the fir trees by the road, and thinking a moment’s privacy might be nice, Yigal walked down it. After a few feet the path was covered with needles, and the trees closed overhead, linking their boughs arm in arm, like a zipper, Yigal thought, until it was almost dark. In the gloom his bare white penis seemed to glow like a firefly, and when he shook it, it was as though someone were waving a handkerchief, trying to get his attention, from a long way off. Nothing he did made a sound. Every noise was swallowed by the immense pillows of needles and twigs stacked around the tree stems and pierced here and there by squirrels’ entrances, exits, and tattered flakes of pinecone, forming a landscape of bumps and hollows as regular as an Olympic mogul run, in which the trees stood like drinking straws thrust into the tops of sand castles.