"Fine," Helen said to Ben. "Chuck Palahniuk."
Ethan grinned. "Sticking with the minimalists, huh?"
"They get to the fucking point," Helen said sweetly.
Ben looked away from Helen, and a faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. "My last will is going to specify that my life-story be penned by Bret Easton Ellis."
"The guy who wrote American Psycho?" I said.
Ben nodded. "The very same."
"You certainly are the transgressive sort," Phil said.
Ben didn't notice Winnie's frown. Instead, he waved a hand at Phil. "So who's writing The Book of Phil?"
Phil considered the question for a long moment before coming to a decision. "Michael Chabon."
"Nice pick," Helen said, nodding.
"Who the hell is Michael Chabon?" I asked.
Helen turned to me and blinked. "Wonder Boys?"
"Okay," I said. "I'll take your word for it."
"No," she said slowly. "You'll read my signed first edition of Wonder Boys, you uncultured fuckin miscreant." She shook her head at me. "How about yours?"
I thought, then grinned. "Marquis de Sade."
"You fucking wish," Ben said, laughing out loud.
"You wouldn't survive one day of Sodom," Phil said, "let alone a hundred and twenty."
I laughed back. "Then I suppose the honor has to go to J. D. Salinger, but only if he writes the book as a collection of interrelated short stories that feature me as a recurring minor character appearing in other people's stories."
"Pretentious prick," Ben said, grinning.
I shrugged. "Just being honest about the part I play in the world. I'm an ancillary player in dozens of stories, but the main character in only one." I glanced around the table to each of them in turn. "When you think about, all of your stories are going feature a character based on me."
"Ancillary, huh?" Ben said. "Methinks that someone else is skipping ahead on his Word-a-Day calendar."
Helen considered. "The man makes a valid point."
"Don't encourage him," Ethan told her, but I saw the contemplative look on his face when he glanced to me.
"But when Mr. Salinger's book gets made into a movie," I said, "it has to be directed by Danny Boyle."
"The director of A Life Less Ordinary?" Winnie asked.
"No," Ethan snapped. "The director of Trainspotting."
Ben shook his head. "No one wants to be remembered for their part in A Life Less Ordinary."
"Who's going to direct your biopic?" I asked Ben.
He didn't even hesitate. "Tim Burton. He's got just the macabre sense of humor that Delicate Situation needs."
Phil laughed at that. Ben looked across the table and watched Phil, a tiny grin playing across his mouth. Phil finally shrugged, and said, "Kathryn Bigelow."
"And just who the hell is that?" Ethan asked.
"Just the first woman to win a Saturn Award for Best Director," Ben scoffed. "You never saw Strange Days?"
"Nobody but you has seen Strange Days," Helen said.
"You've seen Strange Days," he replied with a smirk.
Helen rolled her eyes. "You made me watch it, and it's 145 minutes that I'll never get back. So thanks for that."
"Any time," Ben said, pointing his index finger at her and cocking his thumb as he shot her a wink. "Who's going to direct this Hemingway-penned masterpiece of yours?"
"Palahniuk-penned," Winnie corrected him.
"Right," Ben agreed, nodding. " Sure. That guy."
Helen leaned back in her seat and folded her arms across her belly, accentuating her generous cleavage. I glanced away toward the door and tipped back another mouthful of my soda as she said, "Joel Coen."
Ethan grinned at that. "What about his brother?"
"Just Joel," Helen said curtly, shaking her head.
Ethan laughed. "I would gladly trade every penny in Phil's trust fund in exchange for signing up John Hughes to direct the filmic adaptation of my biography."
Winnie turned to Phil. "You have a trust fund?"
Phil shot Ethan a brief glare, then looked to Winnie with a small smile, and said, "No." I laughed at that.
"It's going to be called Cecilia's Song," Ethan said.
My mind snagged. The words burned brightly in my memory for one glorious moment before I thought of the untidy stack of neon-orange pages piled on the bottom shelf of the computer desk in my bedroom. I had stashed the manuscript down there six months ago, shortly after Ethan had dropped it onto my desk at the beginning of September. I had attempted to read it twice so far, and twice had failed to get further than a dozen pages.
The top sheet read Cecilia's Song in large, plain font.
I blinked twice, then once more. I looked at the game board, saw the bits of plastic representing each of us in our neverending journey around the wheel of time. Winnie rolled a two and moved her gamepiece to a pink space. Phil pulled a fresh card. I looked across the table at Ethan, and found him watching me with a knowing grin.
"What William Makepeace Thackeray novel was made into a film by Stanley Kubrick?" Phil asked.
"Why Cecilia's Song?" Helen asked.
"Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Ben asked.
Ethan bit off a chunk of his cheesesteak and considered Helen's question. He chewed while he thought, then said, "It's got a certain phonetic quality that I appreciate."
Helen watched Ethan eat, and he grinned at her as he washed down his food with his imported soda. There was more to his story than he admitted, but Helen let it go.
"Poe wrote on both," I said to Ben.
He looked at me blankly. "Both of what?"
"A raven and a writing desk," I told him.
"Both come with inky quills," Winnie added.
"They are alike because there is a B in both and an N in neither and a TH in both and neither," Helen said.
Ben blinked at Helen, and she flashed a wide smile. I saw Phil grinning as he looked at Winnie over the card in his hand and asked, "Care to hazard a guess?"
Winnie turned back to Phil. "Barry Lyndon. 1975."
"That would be absolutely correct," Phil said.
Winnie flashed a broad, endearing smile as she fished a brown pie-piece out of the box and tucked it into one of the free spaces in her gamepiece. She rolled the die again for a five, and slid her piece around the rim of the gamewheel. Phil pulled a fresh card from the box and asked her, "What baseball player was nicknamed The Georgia Peach?"
"Oh, come on," Winnie said, laughing. "You know that I don't know the first thing about baseball."
Phil smirked. "Here's a hint: he's from Georgia."
Winnie shook her head. "Rogers Hornsby?"
"That would be incorrect." Phil tucked the card away. "It was Tyrus Raymond Cobb."
"Hornsby's nickname was The Rajah," I told Winnie.
"Hold on," Ben said. "How is it that you know nothing about baseball, but you know about Rogers Hornsby?"
Winnie shrugged. "My dad just bought a whole bunch of sports memorabilia at an estate sale in Hobbes Landing. There was a baseball signed by Rogers Hornsby. He hasn't stopped talking about it for more than a month now."
Ben gave her a sarcastic smile. "A likely story."
Ethan laughed, grabbing the die and rolling a one as Winnie said, "I guess you'll have wait for Winsome, Lose Some to come out in the Spring of 2033 to learn the truth." Ethan shifted his piece a single space counterclockwise, and Winnie added, "It'll be a Kevin Smith film. The whole thing will be in black and white except for two scenes where an amethyst scarf will appear in Technicolor."
I saw the corners of Ethan's mouth twitch into a wistful smile just before he tore off another bite of his cheesesteak. Winnie didn't turn to see Ethan's expression, but she wore a faint smile of her own as she watched a memory.
From beside me, Helen laughed and asked, "Fifteen years from now, you think any of us will be working jobs we hate because they're not what we love to do?"
"I will," Ph
il said. "I'll be an accountant or something."
Ben laughed and shook his head. "I'll be dead."
"Ben!" Winnie admonished him. "Take it back."
"Why?" he said, grinning. "I'm gonna write the greatest novel of my generation by the age of 28, and then descend into the celebrity cesspit of drugs and alcohol before dying tragically young death." He tore off another bite of pizza.
Phil looked over the card in his hand. "I suppose there's no point in dragging out a career knowing that nothing else that you write will be as good as your first book."
"Better to burn out," I agreed, "than to fade away."
"Hey hey," Ethan said with a smirk. "My my."
Winnie shook her head. "Don't joke about dying."
Ben laughed once, softly, but he nodded to her. Helen glanced to Ben, then looked around the table at the rest of us. "Are any of us are going to remember today?"
Her voice sounded distant when she said it. Ben's grin receded, and he glanced from Helen to Phil before turning to me. I looked across the table and saw the small frown on Winnie's lips as she studied her hands, then glanced to Ethan as he shook his head and flashed a dry smirk.
Phil pulled a fresh card from the box. Before he could read the question, I stood from my seat and rounded the table, passing behind Helen as I headed for the counter. I searched through the debris of the latest issue until I found a little disposable camera buried under scrap paper.
"What are you doing?" Phil asked from behind me.
I turned back to the group, held up the camera, framing the five of them inside the viewfinder. "Stapling today into the your memories," I told him. "Now say cheese."
Only Winnie actually did. Ben was too busy flashing rock-horns in his best Gene Simmons impersonation. Phil glanced sidelong toward me, still holding the fresh card in his palm. Winnie favored me with that broad, endearing smile, while Helen cocked an eyebrow at me in a look that somehow both patronizing and curiously alluring. And then there was Ethan, not even looking at the camera, wearing an impossibly knowing grin. Of course he was.
I pressed the button to take the photograph, and the flash erupted like the unfiltered light of a supernova.
3.
The unfiltered light of a supernova splashes through the blinds.
I blink. A couple of seconds later, the headlights swing away across the cul-de-sac outside the window, and darkness rushes back in to fill the bedroom. The silence is compromised only by the steady whirring of the laptop's motor and the intermittent ticking of snowflakes dashing themselves against glass.
I consider that window for longer than any window ought to be considered. Tranquility washes over me, and giddy laughter bubbles up the back of my throat. It never quite makes it out, but the ripples reach my lips. My mouth spreads into a soft smile.
At last, I look back to the laptop resting on my knees, to the last eight words that I just typed at the bottom of the screen:
"Because that was the only truth that mattered."
The cursor blinks at me. I read the words again. My smile widens. It is the greatest closing line that I have ever written. And it may be the eight most improbable words that I will ever write, because after all the years, the story is finally finished.
I read the line again. Just to make sure that I really did write it. Just to ensure that I'm not dreaming the medicated dreams of a dreamer that is dreaming. I have dreamed those dreams before, and others like them: dreams of endlessly circular staircases that lead to cramped stone cells where a man who looks too much like me sits handcuffed to an ancient Remington typewriter.
I blink hard enough to make my eyes water, and brush away the tears with the heels of my hands. I look back to the screen and find my words staring out at me, just as I remember them.
I smile again and shake my head at myself. I save the file, then copy a backup of the entire document to a small flash drive plugged into the side of the computer. Seconds later, I remove the storage device from the laptop and hold it up in the glow of the laptop's screen. This bit of plastic and metal is smaller than my car key, and it holds the entirety of my life's creative work.
I look at the flash drive, and feel oddly humbled.
Ten seconds slip by before I set the laptop on the corner desk and climb out of this hard plastic chair. I stand, stretch, wearing only my boxerbriefs as I unknot my mutinous muscles. I scratch absently at my stomach, and resolve to start working out. A few hundred crunches a week, perhaps. Nothing spectacular.
I glance to the digital clock standing on my bedside table as the maroon numerals flicker to 3:22. I smirk at that, and reach for one of the small shelves above the corner desk. I tuck the flash drive into the back of the ledge, behind a framed photograph that I haven't really noticed much lately. It has watched over me for fifteen years, as I sat in this hard plastic chair, laboring through the solitary confinement of this unimaginable novel.
Now, swaddled by the silent night, I watch the photograph, marveling at this fragment of undigested chronoclastic ether that has been captured, preserved, immortalized. Ben flashes rock-horns in his best Gene Simmons impersonation at the right side of the frame. Winnie favors the photographer with a broad, endearing smile, while Helen cocks an eyebrow at the camera in a look somehow both patronizing and curiously alluring. Phil glances sidelong toward the camera, distracted from the card in his palm. And at the left side of the frame, not even looking at the camera, Ethan wears that impossibly knowing grin.
I lift the frame away from the shelf, and hold it in the glow of the laptop screen, and stare into the past. I don't quite believe that we could ever have been so young, even though just fifteen years have passed since I snapped this photograph. Fifteen years gone. And then the unbearable truth crashes down on me, and it is the only truth that matters. Fifteen years tomorrow.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding, and feel ice in the back of my throat. I look from one face to another across the photograph, across the years, and think of the lives that we have built beyond each other. The truth is as heartbreaking sometimes as it is inescapable, but that will change tonight, for a few hours. We will meet at the Serenity Tavern in downtown Prophecy Creek, such as it were, and we will drink to life. We will drink to death. We will drink to remember. We will drink to forget.
A chill that has nothing to do with the temperature rushes up my arms and down my back, and I smile into the darkness. I can't help it. Standing here in this entreating darkness wearing only my boxerbriefs, I feel the past and the present and the future all brushing up against one another in an overlapping jumble.
My digital clock flickers, and in the brief instant between 3:22 and 3:23, this vast equation that is life balances itself out. Time reaches an improbable equilibrium. I smile, and shake my head. At three-thirty in the morning, I can believe that.
Because of her. The constant. My truth.
She lies on her side under a bundle of ultramarine Egyptian cotton. Her disheveled hair splays out against her pillow as the darkness pulls in tight around her like the delicate breath of her own mortality. Her hip curves smoothly through the shadows as I listen to the syncopation of her steady breathing.
In the brief instant between 3:22 and 3:23, I am struck by how improbable it is that she should be here in this outcome, this place, this moment with me of all people. After everything I've put her through, it seems rather impossible that she could still have chosen to spend her life with me. Impossible, and true.
Yet I know, in this brief instant between 3:22 and 3:23 on a March morning, that she is the only truth that matters.
And as I watch her sleep, and listen to her breathe, I am sure that she knows it too. Of course she does. She always knew.
I set the framed photograph on the desk beside my laptop, and grab a pair of khaki dress pants off the floor. I climb into them, pull on a Flogging Molly t-shirt, and tread barefoot across the carpet to her side of the bed. I crouch beside her, watch her for a moment. Her soft face is unlined an
d untroubled; I memorize it one more time. She exhales as I brush my fingertips through her hair. I draw a deep breath, and a bouquet of spearmint and lime floods through my lungs. She stirs, twists in the sheets, and burrows back into her pillow. Then I stand from the bed and wander out down the hallway toward the living room.
A fine film of ephemeral light overlays the sleek silence of no-time darkness. I cross the room, slip my feet into the pair of Skechers tucked under the couch, and step out into the foyer.
I pull the front door open. A whiteout presses itself against the glass door as the first real snow storm of the millennium ramps up. Projections call for about eighteen inches of snow. It won't be as bad as the blizzard that dropped four feet of snow on Prophecy Creek during my sophomore year and shut down every school in Wenro County, but it might get close.
I push the glass door open and cross the threshold out into that blistering swirl. The storm bites at my face and hands, a great starving beast with invisible teeth and icy venom.
It's not a blizzard. There's almost no wind, and at this hour, almost no sound either. But the storm churns in a shifting haze, beating its fury against the world. My senses crackle
The snow touches down like the whispering of a madman, layers on layers like fresh and unending insanity. The air tastes metallic and brittle, like a deep breath might shatter the night. The sodium-vapor lamp above the door throws a barren light that scatters off each twitching flake until everything is white.
I think of my unimaginable novel, finally finished, stored on a bit of plastic and metal smaller than a car key. I think of those last eight words. I wonder if I will ever write again after tonight. I consider that perhaps I have only one story inside me, a literary cancer that had eaten its way into the dark hollow of my spine
Just one story that I was forever drawn back to.
Until it was finished.
Snow flickers against my cheeks. Now that my story is done, I wonder if I have anything left to say.
I shake my head and laugh at myself, shattering the silent night. Tonight is not the time for that decision. I wrap my arms around my chest, holding in my warmth as my breath billows in a shuddering mist. I won't be out here much longer, but another thirty seconds feels right. Enough to cleanse the psyche.
The Danger of Being Me Page 7
