32Ǐ100.
Laila let out a noiseless breath as her packet flapped shut. Her face stung, as if in a strong sea wind.
Once she could move her fingers again, she thumbed through the chapter, expecting Nazarenko’s notes to spiral across her pages, a zigzagged field of strike-throughs where Mr. Madison had scribbled his circles, some sort of explanation. But as the chaos of grade-collection subsided to her left, she found two lonely annotations over a dozen pages. Page two, first line:
Eden’s heart beat hard in her chest.
I would hope it isn’t located anywhere else.
And page six, halfway down:
Eden’s fingers tightened on the trigger of her phaser.
Take me to your leader.
She reread the notes. “Take me to your”—what did that even mean? Laila felt the urge to laugh that sometimes blossoms out of other, contradictory emotions, like hysterical sadness, or—as in this case—cold horror. She wasn’t even comforted by the equally horrified expressions around her. A queue of thoughts formed that she immediately tried to kick away, because they were obnoxious and arrogant, and she knew it. Thoughts like, Who cares if they all got Fs? None of them are supposed to be good at writing. But why was she supposed to be good? Because she’d assigned that to herself? Because she’d trusted the word of one person?
I wouldn’t lie about your writing, she heard, muted, as if from an adjacent room. She knew Mr. Madison wouldn’t lie, but what did honesty matter? Someone didn’t have to be a liar to be wrong.
Panic welled up in her like a geyser. The Bowdoin wait list. She had to resubmit an updated list of academics and extracurriculars by May, and next quarter didn’t start for another week. If this was supposed to be their only grade for the entire quarter—if Bowdoin saw an F for her final quarterly grade, even if the year wasn’t over yet—
She looked up at Nadiya Nazarenko, who wore a measured look of study, like a scientist watching a labyrinth of rats. Laila’s clouded thoughts stilled and cleared. Hadn’t she known? Hadn’t she looked at this story on Friday night and felt something like revulsion? Hadn’t she felt this paranoia for four years, been unwilling to accept Mr. Madison’s praise because at her core she’d known she could do better?
Now that her fears were confirmed, she was free to move forward, upward, and there sat the person with the answers. Laila felt a pang in her palm. Her fists were clenched so tightly in her lap that her story’s staple had cut into her lifeline. Maybe Nazarenko’s guidance would puncture her, but something would grow back over the injury, not scar tissue but armor, gleaming and valuable. She remembered losing her teeth in elementary school and prodding her tender gums with the point of her tongue as they’d healed, each probe a shock of pain to the root that became addictive. Cariña, her father had said, don’t play with those spots, you want an infection? But she’d never been able to stop. She kept testing, kept pushing, kept exploring those sensitive spaces until the protrusion of the tooth bit her back.
After seventh period, Laila forced her way back into Mr. Madison’s classroom before the last few sophomores trailed out, looking stunned and bloodless. Despite the final bell, Nazarenko hadn’t risen from her stool. She’d taken a notebook from the breast pocket of her felt coat and split it open in her lap. She wore that coat like a military uniform, lapels creased at rigid angles, black steel buttons gleaming as if she waxed them on the hour, dark scarf cinched at her golden throat.
Nazarenko considered the notebook but didn’t write. Laila knew that the woman was aware of her presence, like a spider feels vibrations radiating out from foreign matter stuck in its web. When Nazarenko lifted her eyes, Laila lost courage and found herself looking down at her phone, which had appeared in her palm.
“Yes?” Nazarenko said.
Laila slipped her phone back into her pocket. “This comment you left on my—”
“Shut the door.”
Laila shut the door.
“Sit.” Nazarenko pointed to a desk in the front row. Laila nearly tripped in her haste to get up the aisle.
Nazarenko tucked her notebook into her breast pocket as Laila took the desk. “Go on,” she said.
“‘Take me to your leader,’” Laila read on the sixth page. “What does that mean?”
“It’s something of a joke. Shorthand for ‘I’ve read this before.’ Derivative material is especially glaring in a genre that prides itself on its capacity for innovation.”
“Oh.”
Nazarenko had a painter’s way of examining faces, calculating slopes and depths in a way that felt both mathematical and intimate. “Do you disagree?”
“No! No, this isn’t—I actually wanted to ask what else you thought. I mean, with the grade, I thought you must have other, you know, critiques.”
“Who left the circles on that copy, Piedra?”
“Mr. Madison.”
“What were his thoughts?”
Laila was embarrassed. Not for herself, but for him, so easily impressed. “He said to be proud,” she mumbled.
“Speak up.”
“He told me I should be proud of this. I mean, he always does that. He says I’m my own worst critic.”
Nazarenko unleashed a laugh, a raw, throaty noise, as if a wolf were trying out amusement. “If you’re your own worst critic, you haven’t met the right critic.”
Now I have, Laila wanted to say, but she couldn’t muster the courage. “Yeah,” she said instead, and she hated how bland the word sounded, hated how sentences wouldn’t flow to her tongue as immaculately formed as they apparently did to Nadiya Nazarenko’s, because now she was searching, and searching, and this wasn’t the patient silence Mr. Madison always offered. Everything about the woman on the stool exuded expectancy, a deeply ingrained disapproval that had to be counteracted instantly if there was to be any hope of dislodging it, but what could impress her? What sort of writing did she want to see? They didn’t even talk about writing in class. Today Nazarenko had given a lecture comparing Afrikaans sentence structure to French sentence structure, which seemed like an excuse to show off her fluency in both. The day before, she’d given them a lecture on geode formation. The lessons weren’t uninteresting, but how was any of this relevant? At all?
“S-so,” Laila said, flush with heat from cheeks to palms. “Did you . . . maybe . . .”
“What I wrote is what I think,” said Nazarenko. “I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”
Laila stammered something along the lines of a thank-you or an apology, and when she was back in the hallway, she couldn’t remember having stood, retreated, or made eye contact. She had to splay her palms against the slick cinder blocks for a moment and look up into the gridded lights, breathing like her mother always told her—in for seven, out for six—because her heart was beating like a pulsing thumb hit with a bludgeoning object.
THE METHOD AUTHOR
by Eliot Sandberg,
senior correspondent
for Letters
When I meet Nadiya Nazarenko, author of Catalina’s Mothers and A Flight of Roses, my first task is not to measure the person before me against the reputation that precedes her. The eccentric novelist has a brand of notoriety that authors rarely attain, the type that transcends accolades and enters personal fascination. Even a decade and a half later, I vividly remember the rash of eager, hushed conversations that followed her 2002 New York Times profile, which ran prior to the release of Catalina’s Mothers. The piece confirmed the rumors about the ambitious debut novel: Nazarenko cloistered herself in a nunnery in the Alps, population seven, and lived in complete silence for more than four years in order to plumb the psyche of the eponymous character. In the novel, Catalina is the second coming of Jesus Christ, born to an Italian nun—a virgin, of course—and kept in isolation for the first thirty-one years of her life for fear that she, too, might be killed.
The stunt, as many consider it, wasn’t an isolated incident. Nazarenko’s second novel, The Taste of Less, a polarizing 190-pag
e paragraph written in the first person, focuses on starvation. The author lost a rumored forty pounds over the eight-month course of its writing, not a small percentage of the five-foot, six-inch woman’s body mass. Photographs show a skeletal figure in dark glasses walking the streets of Cape Town, where the novel is set. Hospital records also show that Nazarenko admitted herself to a psychiatric ward after writing her next book, Never Sweeter, which centers on the intertwined lives of five serial killers.
Although I arrive at our scheduled lunch with the intent to ease into discussions of these topics, Nazarenko does not. The first sentence she says to me is, “Nadiya,” and after an agonizing handshake, the second is, “To preempt the foreplay, I didn’t murder anybody for Never Sweeter.” Somehow, she makes this sound charming.
(Continued on page 6)
From: Laila Piedra
To: Tim Madison
Subject: stuff 5:03 PM
* * *
Hi Mr. Madison,
I get why you were talking up the substitute now. I can’t believe Dr. Greene got somebody famous to substitute at good old Impact Future Leaders Charter School. Actually, I can’t believe Dr. Greene knows somebody famous.
I still wish you were back, though. She’s failing everybody. Some people shouldn’t be trusted with power. Hannah sent me this article, and apparently, Nazarenko’s also a murderer. Here’s a link, hopefully they can print it out. Hi, printing-out person!
http://lettersmagazine.com/2017/method-author.html
I asked Felix about what he did when he had his concussion, and he said he listened to podcasts. If you want to listen to something, the audiobooks for In the After Path are awesome. The narrator sounds like the voice of God. Also, Hannah, Leo, Felix, and I are going to start watching the new The Rest season tonight! Finally. I can write you recaps of it since you can’t watch TV, if you want.
I guess that’s it. Camille and I aren’t fighting anymore, thank God.
I hope you’re feeling better and I hope you’ll be able to write back.
Laila
7
“Finally,” Hannah said. “Come in.”
“I still beat Felix, right?” Laila stepped in from the cold light of the streetlamps.
Hannah closed the door and shut out the dark. “Obviously you still beat Felix. You could get incinerated by a comet and get reincarnated and make an odyssey across three continents and still beat Felix.”
In the mudroom, crusts of slush were drooling off Leo’s sneakers amid half a dozen pairs of Hannah’s shoes. As Laila pulled off her boots, Hannah asked, “Did you read the article?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s wild, right? Did she like your story?”
Laila shook her head and tried not to remember the precise red loops of the number 32. All she wanted was to sit in a dark room with her friends, not talk, and watch beautiful people struggle in glorious high-definition. “Is the TV set up?” she asked.
“Yep.” Hannah let the change of subject go without protest. “My parents use that thing so little, it’s still set up from season eleven.”
“Despite hiatus?”
“Despite our sadist-ass showrunners and their Chinese-water-torture release schedules, yeah. Come on.”
Laila followed her into the foyer, where chevrons of hardwood zigzagged away toward the kitchen. Overhead, a light fixture trembled like an extravagant mobile, discs of glass suspended by delicate fibers from gold-brushed rods. She’d never quite grown numb to this place. Laila, Felix, and Leo hadn’t known that Hannah came from obscene wealth until late freshman year, when they’d shown up for a The Rest watch party here, in Brooklyn Heights, to discover that her family owned a six-story townhouse. The place could have passed for a small museum, each floor a confection of heavy brocades, lines of antique Korean pottery, and gilt-framed oil art. Laila still remembered the knot of nervous laughter that had yanked tight in the middle of her throat the first time she’d crossed this threshold, and the way she’d met Leo’s eyes, then Felix’s, knowing they were restraining the same shout of disbelief.
“My parents say I’ve got to be home by 10,” Laila said. “School night.”
“Okay. We can still fit three episodes in if you take a cab home.”
“I don’t have—”
“I’ll get it,” Hannah said, and Laila didn’t argue. Hannah had funded so many late-night cab rides for the others that Laila had begun to suspect she was trying to irritate her parents by spending as much money as possible, as if they would ever notice. Hannah’s parents hardly ever even seemed to come down from their fourth-floor quarters.
“Correction,” Hannah said, glancing at her phone, “we can still fit three episodes in if Felix gets his ass here in the next ten minutes, which he’d better, or I’m going to kill him.”
“You should probably sharpen your weapon of choice,” Laila said.
Hannah took a running jump onto the living room sofa. Leo bounced with her impact. He was scrolling through something on his phone, a snow-dusted beanie pulled low over his locked hair.
“Speaking of which,” Hannah said, putting her feet up on a wine-colored ottoman the size of a bed, “when you write me into your next story, can you give me a space halberd?”
“Ignore her, Leo,” Laila said.
“You know I am,” Leo said. He tucked his phone away. “But if she gets a space halberd, I get a sword that opens passages in the fabric of space-time.”
“Fine.”
When Felix arrived bundled in a parka, Hannah was sprawled at the base of the massive television, remote balanced on her stomach. “Finally,” she announced, pressing the power button, “His Highness deigns to join us peasants.” The screen flickered from dead black to live black, slightly indigo-tinted. Hannah rose to her feet with a pointed stretch and yawn at Felix, her red hair bobbing ostentatiously against her grandparents’ sea of faded art. “Anybody want something to drink?”
“Gee, thanks, honey,” said Felix. “And when I get home tomorrow, there better be dinner on the table.”
“Honestly, go to hell,” Hannah said. “Leo? Drink?”
“I’m all good,” Leo said. Laila must have blinked, because his hand was now overflowing with chocolate-covered raisins that he was siphoning into his mouth. His pocket rattled, chocolate shell against thin cardboard. God knew how Leo ate exclusively trash and maintained a waistline that was approximately the circumference of Laila’s left thigh.
Hannah fetched a pair of beers for her and Felix. “Don’t spill any of that on the upholstery,” she told him, and then she closed her eyes. “Oh my God, that was the most mom thing I’ve ever said. You have to forget that happened.”
“Too late,” Leo said.
“It is written, never to be unmade,” Felix rasped in the voice of the child prophet from The Rest. Laila grinned. Felix’s impressions of the cast members were unparalleled, but he refused to put them on the Internet no matter how much Laila and Hannah urged him.
As Hannah settled beside her, Laila hit the light, turning the living room into a black cavern. Hannah pressed her thumb deep into the gummy resistance of the play button. The screen lit up and swallowed the rest of the world.
A beautiful bullet of a spaceship arced through an asteroid belt, past stones mottled purple and gray, withered as peach pits. The mute rush of space evolved into a tinny whine, then a roar as the camera rushed between platinum hullplates into the spaceship’s interior. A smooth shot tracked through kilometers of white-tiled hall, over neon filigree laced into steel walkways. Then, at last, appeared rows of murky human forms suspended in their tanks, cryogenic fluid shifting through the clouds of their hair. The drone of spaceship operation tapered. A slow shot passed through the glass into a tank, focused on a woman’s face. This was Grayson, one of Laila’s biggest The Rest crushes. Grayson was earnest and optimistic, brave and unyielding, one of those characters who got landed with a new romance every season bec
ause the showrunners killed off her love interests with sadistic regularity.
Darkness followed a tremor of the camera. A bulbous blue eye flashed, and beneath it glinted a greenish tooth the size of a forearm. They went under with Grayson, into the nightmarish chasm where her mind would fight for its life, along with every other surviving member of the ship, against monsters of incomprehensible quantity and ferocity.
They watched three episodes without speaking. The Rest was sacred and could not be interrupted. Against all odds—the Yahoo! hosting, the twelfth season—Laila’s mind crept outside the borders of her body, transplanted into this imagined space like the first time she’d watched this story. She lost herself to the point that she jerked whenever someone dodged a scything claw. She hardly breathed during the rapture scene back on the dying Earth when the nine-year-old prophet boy removed his oxygen mask.
In the brief gap between episodes two and three, she came back to herself enough to recognize her own exhilaration. Someday Laila was going to reproduce this in somebody. This was all she wanted to do with her time alive: make something, anything, that would grip someone—anyone—like she was being gripped. Make someone feel seen, as she felt seen, and transported, as she felt utterly elsewhere. Make someone feel as free and light as dust.
After episode three hit the credits, Hannah killed the TV and cracked her knuckles, a horrible rippling pulse of sound. “Thoughts?”
Laila couldn’t answer. There were too many sentences percolating, all punctuated with frothing excitement and capital letters, none fully formed.
“The dude who wrote the books tweeted that he thinks this is the best season since five,” Felix said, his phone illuminating the scruff along his jawline. “But he’s got that hard-on for Lilly Whatever, so who knows if that’s his actual opinion or if he’s talking through his dick.”
“Again with the unwanted penis imagery,” said Hannah, but Felix didn’t reply. His heavy brows had pushed together, and now he was typing so violently he could have been trying to punch holes in his Android.
Final Draft Page 6
