Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  “Osnat, it sounds to me as though you’ve got exactly what we’re looking for. I’m so glad Yigal put us in touch with you. Have you heard from him lately? How’s he doing?”

  The woman sighed. “Yigal is so strange.”

  We waited, and she sighed again. Then she asked, “How well do you know Yigal?”

  “Um, pretty well.”

  “You know about his hobbies, right?”

  “No,” Mary said. “Unless you mean sex.”

  Osnat laughed bitterly. “Not that—all men go to whores. I mean the gambling and the cocaine. Yigal has a good job, and they say he inherited a lot of money. Where does it all go? But the whores too, you’re right, I just don’t understand it. I’ve told you what I look like. I’ve known Yigal since the army and I always followed him around, and not once, never, has he ever tried anything. At first I thought he was gay. I used to . . .” I stopped listening. What Osnat was saying reminded me vaguely of something I’d read somewhere, a clue to something very important about Yigal. I walked around the room, fingering the books and light switches, reading scraps of paper, squeezing my eyes shut tight and opening them again, retracing my steps, struggling physically to remember this trivial fact which might already have escaped me forever, until suddenly it came to me and I opened the closet door.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MODEL RAILROAD: IN YIGAL’S closet was a disassembled model railroad, stacked upright with the locos and rolling stock on display in cellophane cases on a shelf, and as I looked at it I realized that Yigal’s Israeli identity had fallen to 49 percent and needs to be jacked up a bit.

  For one, there are no closets in Israel. All rooms are bare white boxes with tile floors and small, high windows. Maybe you know someone who runs a catering service out of their basement—that’s what it looks like. None of the furniture is built in—it comes and goes with each new tenant, like props on a set. Instead of closets, there are enormous wardrobes ten feet tall.

  Sometimes from the bus I see new apartment buildings going up with big picture windows facing southwest, and I imagine what it must be like to live in one between April and October: The central air-conditioning whooshing and clattering like a jet engine, dusty swirls of bone-dry air cooled with difficulty to 80 degrees turning the proud owners’ skins—already suffused and boiling in the infrared—flushed and dandruffy until they take to keeping a bottle of Oil of Olay with the remote control. The cat lies in the sun on the bare floor and breathes twice a minute. The dead fan palm has kept its shape and color, and no one knows it’s dead.

  Probably they have closets too, and when their fathers visit they look into the closets, shake their heads, and say, “What a waste of space. The walls are three inches thick, and it’s half empty.”

  Yigal had many thoroughly Israeli qualities which I have failed to emphasize. For one, he loved the Beatles. Also, he loved olives, cheese, and cucumbers. Once a week he rolled up his pants, dumped a bucket of water on his living room floor, pushed it around for ten minutes with a squeegee, and soaked it up again with a towel. He had a feeling of lofty superiority vis-à-vis the sexuality of American men. His number one concern in life was not to be made a fool of, and having money in the bank made him nervous. He drove aggressively, riding the clutch.

  It looked to me like he was modeling American steam—there was a beautiful articulated brass 4-8-4 and a half-finished water tower, the shingles still in rows in a tiny Ziploc bag. Hundreds of twisted wire trees with brown trunks and dull green lichen foliage sprouted from holes drilled in the plywood, and a small mountain lay on the floor, complete with rock breaks, brush, and a flock of minuscule goats led by a weency woman in a red skirt. They were walking toward a pond with a wire willow tree and slightly oversized fish frozen in green, murky shellac.

  Mary came over to look.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “An engine this size on the Durango and Silverton? Goats? There are no hopper cars. What’s this all about?” I took down a Pullman car. Inside were real velveteen upholstery and little brass lamps. A man’s tall hat lay on one of the seats, barely the size of a pinhead in HO gauge.

  Mary touched the pond. “It’s not a model of anything. It’s art. It’s what happens when you take things you don’t know or understand, and use them to make something you love.”

  I like books with long irrelevant sections much better than books with long, purportedly relevant sections that exist only to raise the word count into the one-hundred-thousand paperback-original range. Also, coherent novels are never long enough to stand alone. Murakami’s Pinball, 1973 and Norwegian Wood put together are probably shorter than the irrelevant material in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Without the etymology and pedigrees, Remembrance of Things Past would be just a page-turner in True Confessions.

  Also, Zohar tells me that Sailing Toward the Sunset contains numerous unrelated and “found” texts. For example, Shats assigned the production of his own disavowed poetry to his fictional spy, and parodied, in the form of a sexual orgy, the British Famous Five detective novels for children, with no apparent connection to anything else in the novel, one assumes.

  I was further alerted that his website, members.tripod.com/~shatsA, includes an excerpt, translated into English, from the Schweipert prize committee’s hagiography, and on investigation I saw that Shats had also included quite a few legible clues to the content of Sailing Toward the Sunset.

  “Is mankind descended from the seals?” he asks. “Can one navigate at sea by universal energy?” Yet no one who reads these questions can hope to obtain their answers except by applying himself full-time over a period of years to learn the nuances of literary Hebrew, not only of today, but of several previous eras, according to the prize committee. I sincerely hope that my re-creation of Sailing Toward the Sunset will be complete in time to meet the demand for an English translation.

  (Begin irrelevant interlude)

  “SOMEDAY, L.I.C.” BY NELL ZINK

  When the mail fell through the slot after breakfast, I ambled with an air of self-conscious leisure to poke through it with the toe of my shoe. Then the mailman cranked his siren. I yelled, “I’m here!” and opened the door. He gave me a paper box, about a foot on a side, and drove on.

  I didn’t recognize the return address. Bomb, I thought, but it hardly weighed anything. Could have been ping-pong balls or popcorn. I opened it up with scissors. In the box was a thin plastic sack, thinner than dry cleaners’ plastic, tied with a knot. It was empty, plump, not taut, as if it had been blown up tight and then lost a little air in transit. Of course my first impulse was to stab it, but I sniffed it instead. The odor was neutral—vaguely plastic and smoky, as if it had been a long time outside. I picked the brown wrapping paper off the floor and sat down again to my cup of coffee. I put the plastic bag on the windowsill next to a glass of tulips.

  The return address was interesting.

  Society for the Advancing Recognition

  354-1,345 301st Avenue, #21159T

  Metro U.S.A. ZRHHWEBN

  That was only about forty blocks from my house. Whoever had blown sixty bucks to mail it to me might as well have walked. They had to be rich, or incapacitated, or very busy. A strange gift, I thought. I found some tape and stuck it to the refrigerator. I didn’t puncture it, I didn’t untie it, I didn’t look at it again. In fact, I forgot it existed until two weeks later when the envelope came. “Congratulations!” the note read. “You have not destroyed Part 1. Please submerge Part 1 in a large basin of pure water and immediately add Part 2, enclosed. When the fusion is complete, the resulting stone will be yours to keep.” Part 2 was a chalky blue tablet that smelled of chlorine.

  So it was murder cooked up to look like suicide. My assumption was that I’d stand there holding the plastic bag underwater while they killed me with chlorine gas. The police would find me with the bowl, the tablet, the room reeking of poison, note that I lived alone and key in “Solitude” next to “Cause of Death.”

  So I did the s
ensible thing. I took Parts 1 and 2, a large bowl of water, and a broom out to the street. I meant to hold the bag down with the broom handle so I could keep my distance, but as soon as I put the bag on the water, it began to dissolve. As I pushed it down the escaping gas made the water turn golden and fizz like ginger ale. I threw the tablet in and the water was flung out with a loud, sizzling pop. When I opened my eyes again, there was the perfect-cut pink diamond, rocking back and forth in the bottom of the bowl. I picked it up. Deep inside it, I could see a tiny twentieth-century scene of cattle eating tall grass. I turned it a hair and saw another scene—six human children holding hands around an enormous tree. Then I grabbed the bowl and broom and ran inside.

  There was a different picture in every facet, but the theme was clearly pastoral twentieth century or early twenty-first. You could tell from the colors and the clothes. Fifty-eight pictures for fifty-eight facets, each one beautiful and delicate and hopeful as the past centuries, with a tracery of flowers framing some, and leaves framing others, and if you pressed it right up to your eye and looked into the light, the scene came alive in three or four dimensions—the solemn children would seem to smile, the cattle would advance one step, very subtly and almost imperceptibly. It was a bit like something I’d once seen on TV. Except the one I’d seen was smaller, and darker, with a single motionless hologram. The guards carried machetes (guns were too routine, they didn’t frighten anyone anymore) because, as the narrator pointed out, a hologrammatic diamond was worth at least $70 trillion. I presumed mine was worth more. I wrapped it in flannel and put it on the shelf with the noodles, and got it out every half hour to look at it. Around nightfall I realized that it was already precious to me. I sat down to write a thank-you note.

  “Dear Society,” I wrote. “Thank you so much for the beautiful gem. It is lovely. Thank you for thinking of me. Very truly yours, Cynthia.” I folded the note and wrote the society’s name on the outside. Then I put on my boots for the walk to 1,345th Street.

  My neighborhood was not a nice one. Its chief drawback was the sewer towers. Some urban planner a hundred years before had thought of instituting permanently recycling antiseptic rivers for universal waste disposal. The towers were the entrances for household trash. They had airlocks to keep the gas down, but they all leaked. As a result, my rent was very low. The air smelled of raw sewage. There was no way anything could decompose down there under the lights. We were slated for renovation, but of course now that the neighborhood had gone down, no one but me lived there, so the renovations were always being put off. But I didn’t mind. My rent was about a quarter of what it should have been for an entire house. I bought a fancy air purifier and never opened the windows. So anyhow, I cut over to 304th Avenue, where the sewers are sealed off, and took the elevated walkway.

  It was a warm, humid night with good visibility. The microwave balloons were at full altitude in deference to the high ozone. I could see the towers of Metroform on the horizon, looming behind a monolithic apartment block, and backlit by the fading clouds. There was a light ashfall. I put on my hat.

  The walkway seemed to have been abandoned—no lights, no footprints in the ash. Probably there had been some rumor that it was dangerous, and now it was. The tiles creaked as if unused to being stepped on. I enjoyed the warmth of my hands in my pockets and thought about my diamond. It was nothing more than a rock, but seemed warm as another human body. The cool shades of green and blue gave warmth. When I looked at them, I felt my own warmth, as I never had under our sky of orange and brown, with all those cultured red roses, yellow tulips, pink granite—everything designed to be warm and friendly, but in the end no more friendly than the sun at noon.

  I thought about the hologram I liked best: a round pool of water, surrounded by trees and overhung with tall grass, with an empty boat floating in the middle. It was the only picture that made room for me. All those happy children, animals, flowers, bright insects; all that cool white morning sunshine—all those self-contained vignettes of the past seemed made to tease me, luring and excluding me at once. To lie in the boat, which rocked a bit when the light changed, on its circular pool—what higher completeness could there be? Tiny green leaves and blue overhead, blue underneath, flowered banks on every side, no possibility of going anywhere, just an invitation to me to lie drowsy and motionless and wait. Of course I wasn’t ignorant that they might have mailed out millions of them—I don’t mean that I thought I was unique, but that the work of art was uniquely moving, in the way you could spend hours and hours looking into it before slowly realizing my point about that little green boat.

  When I got to 1,345th Street I took the stairs down into the darkness below. Night had fallen. It was an old business district. It took me a few minutes to figure out which lobby to use, but I realized the T in the address referred to the elevator bank. There was no 211th floor in the T elevators, so I rode to 210 and looked for the stairs.

  There was an eerie moaning sound coming from the walls. The building was swaying in the night wind as air from the sea rushed in over the warm air of the city. The inversion happened every night and was, I had read somewhere, the reason there are no really tall buildings in the old coastal cities.

  I walked around until I found a door labeled “S.T.A.R.” It had a tiny, dark window of reinforced glass and a strong, cold draft whistling around it as the building’s motion eased the door in and out of its frame. I looked through the window. The stairs went up to another door, also labeled “S.T.A.R.” In my opinion, they were stairs to the roof. I didn’t know where to put my note. Under the whistling door? Certainly not under the next door, outside. But maybe there was a mailbox. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked but wouldn’t budge. I waited a few seconds as the structure flexed again, and then I was on the stairs. I walked up, holding the handrail and shivering. The 211th floor had been toasty warm (heat rises, I suppose) but the air circling in that stairwell was very cold. There was no mailbox and the door was locked.

  I turned to go back to the lobby. I figured I’d leave my note at reception. Then I heard a loud buzz, as if someone were buzzing me into a grocery store. I jumped back up and leaned on the door. The wind ripped it open and I stood under a sky black as coal, perforated with spots of brilliant light. Around me everything was black too—there were walls fifty or a hundred feet high, I had no way of telling, all around me. I was alone in a narrow shaft, twenty feet on a side, with the freezing wind rising and falling powerfully, as if the walls were somehow permeable to wind but not to light. The roof under my feet was soft and springy. And over my head were stars. The stars are perfectly well known—I’d seen dozens of pictures of them taken from the Chinese mountains and the space telescopes—but it had just never crossed my mind that I might see them myself for the first time from a medium-sized building in the middle of Metro U.S.A. I looked up so long that a few new stars appeared to push the old stars off to one side. Then I set my thank-you note down—it could swirl in the wind up there forever, but it wouldn’t blow away—and ran down the stairs to the warmth of the world below.

  I had trouble finding elevator bank T again. Instead, I found elevator bank U, for floors 210 through 270. I hadn’t been on the top at all. I pressed the request button and a car came. I stepped in to see that it had buttons for all the higher floors, but I didn’t stay on. I went back to the S.T.A.R. office. The wind was still whistling around the doorframe as I crept inside. The upstairs door was still locked, but after I tried it I heard the buzzer again, and nudged the door. It opened in a blaze of light. Overhead at the zenith was the small summer sun in a sky of pale blue. All around my feet were trampled violets. The high walls were dappled in a pattern of pale and dark green, and the breeze was warm and ticklish. I could see the size of the enclosure very precisely—rectangular, and smaller than I’d thought before. I put my eyes against the dark, cool green walls and tried to see through the mesh. I could make out snaking pipes and cables, and accordion-pleated air-delivery tubes, and fan blades. W
hen I looked up again the sun had moved. I heard a twittering sound like a small engine squeaking, which appeared to come closer as it moved toward me in a spiral and then away again. I leaned down to feel the violets. They were real, living violets, moist and green as wet lettuce. My thank-you note was wet. By slow stages, I lay down and watched the sunset—that is, I watched the sun begin to touch the upper edge of the wall and move out of sight, dragging a deeper blue behind it.

  I had decided that S.T.A.R. was an artist, very rich, because if you could make hologrammatic diamonds like mine you’d be bound to get rich very quickly, who could afford to be so idealistic that instead of selling his pieces to the highest bidder he had started giving them to people at random. Or not exactly random—he’d held an auction in which the bids consisted not of money but of elements of personality, and by keeping Part 1 on the refrigerator, I had bid high enough to get Part 2. The sun was vanishing and the air was getting colder. A solitary planet appeared and the wind began to pick up. I felt disappointed and got up to leave. Then I noticed the circuit box. I opened the small black door and read the list of options: Adjust Day Length, Time of Day, Season, Altitude, Temperature, Wind Strength, Lamb (Manual), and Part 3. The screen shimmered in the gathering dusk. I was torn between Lamb (Manual) and Part 3. I didn’t know that it was up to me to start Part 3, or maybe I’d already seen Part 3. So I touched the screen at Time of Day and picked high noon again. The air warmed and slowed, and the sun jerked back into the upright position. Then I touched Lamb (Manual) and heard a click, like a sliding bolt, as all the colored lights and the sun went out and I was left surrounded by impenetrable metallic mesh in a dim gray elevator shaft. I felt a twinge of claustrophobia, like someone trapped in a mine. Then the lamb appeared behind the mesh, and I saw the tiny door, just his size, that he was indicating with gestures of his head. I kneeled and opened it, and he stepped inside. When I closed the door the lighting reversed again and it was high noon. The lamb put his head down and began to eat violets. He pulled them up by the roots.