From the jump ball, I wanted to fit in at my new job, strived to look the part, though fitting in and looking the part were objectives I had successfully failed to achieve at every stage in my dissibellatating life. So from my first day forward I wore a sleeves-rolled-up white shirt and a skinny-snake black tie, too. Myron looked like he belonged, if anybody did, and thus I wanted to pass myself off as a much taller, younger, and femalerish edition of him. Besides, who doesn’t love the classic Blues Brothers movie uniform? I don’t think Myron was impressed, if he noticed at all. But Kelly certainly did.
Kelly was a gosh-and-golly, pretty-as-springtime senior editor who owned more pant suits than Hillary Clinton and who took an instantaneous dislike to me. On my divirginating morn, she craned her head upward and studied me and my gnattily chosen attire.
“Giraffe new girl, I really don’t think so.”
“Giraffe new girl? You seriously say that?” Giraffe hadn’t been lobbed into my bunker since middle school. “Look at you. You just sail in on the PMS Pinafore?”
“Well, you are unnecessarily tall. Poor thing, do you have some rare, incurable, Elephant Girl–type bone disease?”
“That’s an example of what you call thinking? They should send out an Amber Alert so we can all go search for your kidnapped brain function? Then again, why should I fucking care what you really don’t think?”
You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Thus commenced Kelly and my fabled association.
One other noteworthy trait of Machine Gum Kelly. As we all would acknowledge, the world is divided between the people like me who are revolted by the sight of anybody chewing gum and the people who should be cast adrift on the high seas minus provisions. And Kelly masticated gum like it was her vocation. I presume she needed some calling to commit to, given her limited editorial acumen. Chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp chomp, all the livelong day. Why she couldn’t have satisfied her oral fixation like an ordinary person with chewing tobacco or smoking cigarettes or anything comparably salutary is beyond me and, I trust, you as well. If you were wondering whether or not it was possible to chew gum and intelligently edit a book at the same time, the Kelly Girl was all the evidence required to conclude in the negative.
In my little bookish kingdom by the sea, to get to the bottom line, Myron Beam Me Up did sign my checks. In case you were asking yourself what color is your parachute and what you should do for a career, my dad probably has a few copies of that huge-selling book lying around, which you can borrow, from when he went through his two midlife crises. I think it is mathematically impossible to have two midlife anythings, but then again I didn’t light up the classroom in pre-, post-, or anti-calc. In any event, forget Silicon Valley and rush into the exciting world of publishing, then buy all cash a Park Avenue or Pacific Heights condo, baby. My paycheck was so enormous, a Samoan bodyguard should have accompanied me to the bank. Which reminded me, I needed to sign up for online banking like everybody else between Central and Golden Gate Parks. There were a lot of things I needed to do, like get a new job, like join a gym, like get that stupid tattoo Junior talked me into lasered off.
Muse advertises my electric-blue tat because Junior swore I was that to him and I was gullible and drunk enough one night in the East Village to subscribe to and act upon it. Better than Junior Editor, I suppose. And way better than what the drunker, hysterical girl next table over was getting stamped on her rap-star-approved if-and-and butt: USDA CHOICE. Since Muse is right above my breast, and therefore I’d have to strip my shirt off for somebody else to see it, there was a solid chance it would never again be viewed by anybody but me in what was shaping up to be my nunnery lifetime. It wasn’t like the tat was as big as the logo on my college jersey, and not that it pulsed like a neon beer sign, but I knew it was there, and that made me think about Junior every single day, which I wished I could stop doing.
Trouble is I couldn’t find time to take care of such business, or to launder my five rotating white shirts as often as I should, because for one thing the washer/dryer was always on the freaking fritz downstairs despite the relentless rent increases supposedly for fictive property upfuckingkeep. I was inundated by manuscripts from the splendidly named slush pile, and I read them all day and night long. When I was not reading manuscripts, I was often reading Proust. Well, trying to read Proust, and you got me how he ever wiggled out of the slush pile. At that time, I was on Volume 1, with—I think—a mere five million mouthwatering pages left to go. Talk about a page-turner beach read. At the rate I was going, I would reach FIN toward the end of Michelle Obama’s second term as president. Nonetheless, I hoped something resembling a story not connected to a cookie should kick in one day. As cookies go, his is tasty and very influential, but come on. “For a long time, I went to bed early.” As for me, I fell asleep early as well, the instant I turned one of Monsieur Marcel’s pages in search of lost time and a human heartbeat. I realize this does not constitute begging the question but: Is there any justification for the French? Their way of life, I mean?
Then again, reading’s not what I call a problem. That’s what I will always call the best fucking job in the whole world.
Along with Kelly, there were other senior editors. One of them stood out for her knack of expressing more than her fair share of opinions, on a wide range of mysterious subjects, hardly any views of which I comprehended. I say “stood out,” but honestly, I have few recollections of her not planted in her chair. Unfortunately, I cannot mimic Murmechka’s inimitable accent (but think taffy stuck in your teeth) or identify the country of origin or hazard a guess as to whether that country was in good standing in the United Nations, or if maybe it was a West Texas county and Texas has not yet seceded from the Union. Wherever she hailed from, her ethnic fashion fallback choices were remarkable and idiosyncratic, resembling pastel pup tents. She was plus-plus-plus-plus-size (no disrespect intended), which explained a great deal to her endocrinologist if not me. The other day I had heard her tell somebody, “A dog may blow a whistle but he cannot call himself to the hunt.” She often passed along such wisdom to innocent bystanders without prompting or provocation. I knew it was wisdom because the beneficiaries of her insight shook their heads and repaired in a distant port for a private cry or a tequila shooter. Yet the part of the job I liked more than I would have expected was that Murmechka’s desk was nearest my multicolored milk crates.
As my colleague liked to say: “A lover may weep for joy but will not swim to the farther shore where the birds serenade her at dusk.” My hunch was Murmechka of the North hailed from a landlocked, ice-bound kingdom where denizens doffed patriotic flip-flops the year-round.
That’s it for now, Wolf. Junior Editor Sibella reporting from the outermost regions of The People’s Democratic Republic of Transurrealia. Now back to you situated in the Situation Room. Wolf?
✴✴✴
Shall we get down to business? It’s as good a time as any.
One day—a pretty important day, as it would turn out for everybody, particularly me—I said to Myron Beam, my illustrious boss, “Myron, what fuck the fuck? You look like shit?”
* * *
1My one and only footnote, if you’re lucky. Something tells me you are going to need more than a rabbit’s foot. You’re going to need a way bigger boat.
Wuthering Sibella
Because he did. Our relationship was like that.
Whoa, do not go there.
Not that we had a relationship with stupid air quotes, if you know what I mean. That would have been unprofessional. Also it would have been more probable I’d be whisked off by aliens in their Tesla-look-alike UFO. Antiquarian Myron had to be over fifty, which I deduced from opening his weekly missives from the AARP urging him to enjoy discounted mambo lessons and two-month journeys to destinations like Never-Never Land and Portland, Oregon. To be absolutionly clear, I don’t get involved with elderly men. Or, since t
he Junior, anybody whatsoever. Come on, stop making me think about that sickening subject. If you would be so kind.
“I look like shit? Thanks, Sibella? But you know what? I can explain?”
As usual, Murmechka injected herself proverbially: “A man may look like shit, but when the moon…”
I begged her, “Please?”
“The day a woman falls silent from a great oak tree, that’s when Mr. Coyote…”
“I mean it, Murm, not the right time?”
Myron used to say I made him talk like the way he talked to me, like what he termed a “Valley Girl.” Such a tic in others Myron considered legitimate grounds for self-defense homicide, but for some reason not in me. Myron said my uptalk was contagious, yet kind of “endearing”—a term that had heretofore never been invoked with reference to anything I said, did, or wore. He contended without any factual basis that when I was a baby I must have been kidnapped by the ferocious Uptalk Tribe, more merciless and cutthroat than any band of savages doing an exsanguinationistic cameo in a McMurtry. Larry McMurtry was a great writer, Myron proclaimed. Therefore, one weekend I rode into Lonesome Dove, and that was fucking fantastic, and all the rest of his books turned out to be great, too, and Myron was right about McMurtry, and about many other books until he got screwed up about some con artist or saucy sorceress called Calypso O’Kelly, as you’ll see. But I was no dippy Valley Girl. I was an Island Girl, as in Manhattan.
He also said I probably had a mild case of Tourette’s, and there were mild drugs I should take for that. But I’ve done more drugs, mild and otherwise, than I care to, by which I mean can, remember. X was entirely too much fun on college weekends, its effects disastrously illuminating. I was unaware before being Mollified that everybody was beautiful and that I could really dance, but now, an older and a wizened girl, I realize they aren’t and I can’t. I’m glad nobody Instagrammed me rocking my go-to ravey moves. I’d also particularly like to forget this one time I swallowed Ritalin. I had the crackbrain notion it would boost my energy and elevate my humble hops before the Big Game against Saint You Don’t Got a Goddamn Prayer Tech. Brilliant. I couldn’t make a shot. I mean that, not one shot, zero points, goose eggs. It didn’t help that the basket looked like it was boinging on a string and was as tiny as the corner pocket on a pool table. The girl I was “guarding” took pity, only going for twenty when she could have had twice that. When we lined up alongside each other on the lane in rebounding position for a free throw attempt, she leaned over: “Hey, Sister Skippy, them rids is bad juju.”
So many designer drugs out there, like the current champion of the anxiety-ravaged set, Klonopin. How does Big Farma come up with such Brave New Worldish names? The brand names seem more suitable to environmentally sensitive, technologically advanced automobiles.
Let’s Go Places, Ativan.
Buspar, The Car that Cares.
Zoom Zoom in Your Zoloft.
Shift Expectations: All-New Celexa.
Paxil, Pursuit of Perfection.
Valium—Or Nothing.
Imagine Yourself in an all-new Klonopin.
So, thanks, but no more drugs for me. And let’s be clear: I don’t have Tourette’s, I just have a potty mouth, according to my social scientist mom, who ought to know.
It’s kind of entertaining to have an anthroapologist parental unit who tracks your behavior as if you were some exotic species out of Margaret Mead, in my case that rarest of species, adolescenta aggressiva passiva. I am the raw, she is the cooked. There is a huge diorama of teenagers in the Museum of Natural Hysteria alongside the Mastodons, or should be, complete with tube tops and miniskirts and iPads and iPods and ankle bracelets and vats of mascara. She and Dad must have whiled away many a happy hour comparing notes of me crawling around in my own individualized Skinner Box. No, I am not serious: no Skinner Boxes permitted by the co-op board in our brownstone. My folks never outgrew the sixties and have the patchouli oil and Birkenstocks and Woodstock reminiscences to prove it. (They are to this day talking about Jimi Hendrix doing the Star Spanglish Banner as if it was Eyegor Stravinsky, but sure, fine, there are parallels.)
Of course, my father is a psychologist who is committed to the talking cure. I myself was betting on the reading cure to do the trick for me someday. Now, everybody who wasn’t an anthropologist was a psychologist back in the vainglorious sixties when they weren’t a sociopathologist or cinemacriminologist. “Say more, Dad,” I often said when I wanted to pull the emergency brake on his runaway train of questions about where I went and what I did last night. Which did not consist of trashing the bowling alley or flashmobbing or tagging the expressway underpass with the rest of us Spence School for Girls Gangbangers, as he might have hoped of a hormonally challenged teenager he had been professionally trained to misapprehend. I was such a disappointment. I was usually at the library with the rest of the New York City deviates. Remember libraries? I miss them now that they have been supplanted by media centers.
Anyway, Myron was trying to be nice with his Tourette’s remark, but he didn’t type MD after his name. He didn’t type anything. Since I showed up, I did all his typing for him when I wasn’t, you know, draining the slush pile and answering the fucking phone.
How I got to San Francisco and got a job as a junior editor at Myron’s publishing house I don’t quite understand. If I may belabor the drug topic, there must be the equivalent of Publishing Rohypnol circulating out there and somebody slipped me a Mickey during some poetry reading. I remember poetry readings like it was yesterday (cue the bling bling bling bling sound effects). Such as the reading long ago when my destined-to-be-dumper of a college ex read from his poetry and first made the acquaintance of his trust fund princess, who hung around afterward for way too long near the biohazardous wine and tossed her long blonde locks around like they were lifelines to drowning seamen. I’m tempted to comment on Junior’s seamen, but I will resist, as I have gotten over him, a little bit. After I graduated later with that what-was-I-thinking MFA, I sent out my résumé and a cover letter in which I said in twenty different ways how much I loved loved loved books, then bought an economy seat on a transcontinental plane next to the portliest guy on any of the seven transcontinents, probably on his way home from some hot-dog-eating contest, and I left New York and Junior and found a studio apartment in San Francisco even a flea band would find claustrophobic, but then it gets fuzzier than that.
This day when the trouble begins wasn’t quite as blurry. A screaming comes across the sky.
✴✴✴
“You sleep at your desk?” Thus spake Sibellathustra.
“I didn’t sleep?”
If he was right about the uptalk and its being contagious, I decided I would have to do something about that post hasty. I would be willing to volunteer myself to be captured and deprogrammed in Montana or South Dakota or some other state where real bagels are against the goddamn law. If I couldn’t manage that, I’d take a class in Uptalk Twelve-Stop Techniques. It was very annoying, no question mark. Funny thing, I never was uptalk-conscious in the moment when I was uptalking, so I couldn’t check myself in time before going pointlessly interrogative.
“I read all night this book that came in over the transom?”
“Wow, all night, across the transom, must have been good?”
“Sibella, do you know what a transom is?”
It’s where Myron liked to say books came in, that’s what I knew. I never found anything that looked remotely like what I imagined a transom to be—yet another arcane Joseph Conrad nautical device? I scoured the vicinity of the copier and the fax machine, which perennially had pretty cobwebs and columns of industrious and gleeful ants marching all over it, like they had seized upon a blue-ribbon watermelon at the county fair. So, no, I didn’t know what transom meant. I thought all the manuscripts came in through email attachments or via Bud, the postal service guy who liked to whistle a federally hap
py tune. There ought to be drugs for that whistling affliction. As for transom, however, no problem. Myron told me. What’s the use, he could have said, but I never heard him ask a rhetorical question, not once. Evidently a transom has, among other meanings, this one: “the horizontal beam on a cross or gallows.”
I am confident you’re with me when I admit I was not “following the bouncing ball.” In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. (Kelly, you yourself might not miss that Be Latent literary collusion.) My dad often found cause to advise me to “follow the bouncing ball,” which, despite being pretty handy with a basketball, I was not always able to do, as you will not always appreciate. That was a choice expression of my dad’s, whom I love to pieces, even if he used expressions I didn’t understand and asked me to talk about my feelings and not the feelings of the Count of Monte Christo or Jude the Obfuckingscure. Another expression he deployed was “loose operation.” Which was how he characterized any of my job schemes: a loose operation. I do give him extra credit for never asking me where I saw myself in five years. And don’t you try it, either.
Sibella & Sibella Page 2
