by Ben Lerner
The next day my agent helped me word my mea culpa, no doubt back-channeling with the editors about how all of this was new to me, that I was mainly a poet unused to being edited, that my apparent impertinence was the issue of inexperience, etc. The magazine was gracious and decided to run the revised story quickly—so quickly, in fact, that, a few weeks later, I could read it in the doctor’s office while I waited for Alex to emerge from her extractions.
TWO
THE GOLDEN VANITY
The author waited for the librarian in the coffee shop on the little commercial strip across from the campus. He sat by the window facing the Gothic stone buildings and watched the students walk head down against the wind.
Someone said his name because his coffee was ready. He approached the counter and collected the giant cappuccino, noting the flower pattern in the foam. As he started the walk back to his table, the coffee shop door opened, admitting cold air and a middle-aged woman, surely the librarian; she recognized him and waved.
His problem was that the coffee required two hands, or at least he had taken it with two hands, one on cup and one on saucer, so as not to spill coffee or upset foam; he couldn’t return her wave. He felt himself scowling at this situation, realizing too late she’d think he was scowling at her. His solution was to look at the cup with exaggerated intensity, in the hope that she would understand his dilemma. He walked slowly, eyes fixed on the dissolving flower, to the seat beside the window, having ruined everything.
But he remembered Dr. Roberts’s idea. Roberts had said that when the author found himself in one of these “false predicaments,” and he began to draw shorter and shorter breaths, he should just describe whatever little crisis he’d manufactured, what he was feeling, to whomever he was meeting in the same “winning and humorous way” he recounted it after the fact to Roberts.
The librarian was at the table she’d inferred was his destination by the time he reached it. He set down the cup and saucer with excessive care. She had a lot of curly hair he only now saw as auburn. He shook the hand she extended and said:
“I wanted to wave to you when you came in but I had this coffee in my hands and I was afraid I’d spill it and then I was afraid that by failing to wave I appeared unpleasant and then I felt myself scowling at appearing unpleasant and then realized I must really seem unpleasant and so had already made a disastrous impression.”
She laughed as though this were indeed winning, and said, “You sound like your novel.” The anxiety dissipated, but into flatness. He spilled some of the coffee lifting it to his lips.
* * *
The year before, they’d found cavities in the author’s wisdom teeth; they needed to come out. He could elect IV sedation (“twilight sedation”) or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested. They’d taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation. There was no rush. It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that’s all. Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the IV, said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it. The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood. This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they’d been sedated or not.
That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza. They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees. Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the IV.
The unusual heat felt summery, but the light was distinctly autumnal, and the confusion of seasons was reflected in the clothing around them: some people were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, while others wore winter coats. It reminded him of a doubly exposed photograph or a matting effect in film: two temporalities collapsed into a single image.
“I don’t want them working on me when they know I won’t remember what they’re doing,” he said.
“We are not talking about this again,” Liza said. It was characteristic of Liza to begin an activity by claiming she’d have no part in it. “We’re not having Thai food” meant that she’d come around to the idea; “We’re not seeing that movie,” that he could buy tickets.
“But more than that,” he said, ignoring her, “I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”
“And who knows,” Liza said, quoting him from previous walks, “if the memory is really abolished or just repressed, distributed differently.”
“Right. And that could be worse,” he said, as if this were an original idea. “A trauma cast out of time, experienced continuously, if unconsciously, instead of as a discrete event.”
“So many of these people,” Liza proclaimed gravely, making a sweeping gesture that included couples on benches, families playing in the grass, and a group of women practicing Tai Chi, “are living lives ruined by repressed trauma surrounding their wisdom teeth.”
“If I take the drugs, it’s like dividing myself into two people.” He ignored her again. “It’s a fork in the road: the person who experienced the procedure and the person who didn’t. It’s like leaving a version of myself alone with the pain, abandoning him.” They turned south onto the path that would eventually take them to the lake.
“And then you meet him one day in a dark alley. And he wants to settle the score.”
“I’m serious.”
“Or he starts inserting himself into your life, sabotaging your relationships, causing scandals at your work. You’d have to kill him, kill yourself.”
“And what kind of precedent am I establishing, exactly, if I deal with a difficult experience by inducing amnesia?”
“You already have amnesia. We have this conversation every day.”
“Look, I have to decide tomorrow. One business day before the procedure.”
“What do you want me to say? I’d do local if the dentist says that’s sufficient, and save the three hundred dollars you’ll have to pay out of pocket for the IV. But I’m a lot tougher than you are.” She was. “You’re going to do the twilight-sedation thing because you’re a weakling. It’s a sure sign that you’re going to do it that you keep worrying about it.”
They walked in silence until they reached the lake. On the near shore, a group of teenage girls, maybe Mexican, were dressed in white, practicing a dance involving paper streamers, tinny music issuing from a portable stereo. The softening sky was reflected in the water. Airplanes moved slowly toward LaGuardia; a few swans moved slowly across the surface of the pond. Everything suddenly complied, corresponded: the pink paper streamer in a girl’s hand echoing the rose streak of cloud that was echoed in the water. He felt the world rearrange itself around him.
“I’m just doing local,” he resolved.
“The sublimity of the view has lent the young man courage,” Liza said, deepening her voice.
“Shut up,” he said.
“Napoleon alone on the eve of battle communing with the Alps, receiving their silent counsel.”
“Shut up,” he said, laughing.
* * *
When he woke up the next morning, he called the dentist’s office and told the receptionist he wanted the IV. Then he called Liza and said he’d changed his mind and would she go with him Monday because they won’t let you leave unaccompanied with all those drugs in your system. She sighed theatrically and said sure.
That night he was going on a date. Or at least he was meeting his friends Josh and Mary for drinks, and they’d invited a woman, Hanna
h, they thought he might like, who might like him. It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.
Since late the previous spring, when he’d published his novel to unexpected praise, the women his friends attempted to set him up with had invariably read his book, or had at least glanced, in advance of their meeting, at those preview pages available online at Amazon. This meant that instead of the conventional conversations about work, favorite neighborhoods, and so on, he’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical. Even if these questions weren’t posed explicitly, he could see, or thought he saw, his interlocutor testing whatever he said and did against the text. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.
He spent most of the afternoon at the little drafting desk beside the window, answering e-mails from the college, where he was on leave from teaching, and failing to answer interview questions for a small magazine in England, worrying about his teeth. He did laundry—there was a small washer-and-dryer unit in a closet—and he paced the eight hundred square feet of his third-floor apartment distractedly, opening a book at random, reading a page, returning it to the pine shelf without knowing what he’d read. He showered, stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of the laundry-closet door, and considered his unfortunate body, how it might appear to Hannah, whoever she was, how he might compensate for its many flaws through strategic angling and flexing.
They were meeting at a bar in Dumbo far from any train. When the sun had set, he decided to take a long walk, eventually make his way there. It was still unseasonably warm but there was now an implication of winter in the air. Lights and voices looked and sounded different within it, sparkled more, carried farther. He turned left onto Atlantic from Fourth Avenue, the adhan issuing from the mosque’s crackling speakers, and slowly walked the mile and a half to the Promenade. He leaned against the iron railing; the intensities of Manhattan loomed across the water.
Eventually he turned from the river and wandered back through Brooklyn Heights. On a small cobblestone street that dead-ended unexpectedly, some conspiracy of brickwork and chill air and gaslight gave him the momentary sense of having traveled back in time, or of distinct times being overlaid, temporalities interleaved. No: it was as if the little flame in the gas lamp he paused before were burning at once in the present and in various pasts, in 2012 but also in 1912 or 1883, as if it were one flame flickering simultaneously in each of those times, connecting them. He felt that anyone who had ever paused before the lamp as he was pausing was briefly coeval with him, that they were all watching the same turbulent point in their respective present tenses. Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.
Reggaeton from a passing car returned him to himself. He checked his phone for the time and directions to the bar and walked underneath the roaring bridges into Dumbo, his hands cold with anxiety as the meeting place drew near. He was late enough now that he assumed Hannah would have already joined Josh and Mary. He found the address—no sign, just a single exposed bulb near the door—touched his face to see if it was greasy, would be shiny, but found it dry. Then he located the little packet of breath strips in his coat pocket. When he tried to place one on his tongue, he realized he’d accidentally removed several mentholated strips at once; they congealed into a gummy mass, which he spat onto the sidewalk.
The bar was twilit in the speakeasy fashion, dark wood and a tooled tin ceiling, most of the seating in paneled booths, no music. It was quiet enough that he could hear the bartender shaking one of the artisanal cocktails whose prices he was resolved not to complain about aloud, and he immediately saw Josh, whose face was at this point mainly beard, and Mary, who was wearing a hat, a cloche he’d already decided was a mistake, in a corner booth across the room. He couldn’t see Hannah, who was behind a panel, but inferred her presence from Josh and Mary’s postures, the nature of Josh’s wave, maybe the number of glasses on the table.
Would you know what he meant if the author said he never really saw her face, that faces were fictions he increasingly could not read, a reductive way of bundling features in the memory, even if that memory was then projected into the present, onto the area between the forehead and chin? He could, of course, enumerate features: gray-blue eyes, what they call a full mouth, thick eyebrows that she was probably careful to have threaded, a small scar high on the left cheek, and so on. And sometimes these features did briefly integrate into a higher-order unity, as letters integrate into words, words into a sentence. But like words dissolving into sentences, sentences into paragraphs and plots, combining these elements into a face required forgetting them, letting them dematerialize into an effect, and that somehow never happened for long with Hannah, whom he was now beside.
Who was in profile three drinks later, laughing at Josh’s high-pitched imitation of their boss, petty tyrant of the production company where they edited film. He watched her tuck strands of black hair behind her ear, noted its pointed helix, only now perceiving her nose ring, silver but appearing rose gold in that light. Then, Josh and Mary gone, they were side by side in the booth, leaning against each other a little more with each drink, and he was saying these things about faces to her, how it’s important for a writer to be “bad with faces,” and she asked if he had ever seen the satellite image of that rock formation on Mars—one of those standard textbook images used to illustrate pareidolia, a term he’d never heard. It’s when the brain arranges random stimuli into a significant image or sound, she explained: faces in the moon, animals in clouds. She took out her phone and Googled it, and he used the excuse of looking together at the little glowing screen to press more closely against her.
* * *
On the wall behind Dr. Roberts hung a tactically inoffensive abstract painting, rhythmic brushstrokes in lavender, blue, green—very competently executed visual Muzak. If you asked the author what Roberts looked like, he would conjure the painting rather than the face.
Roberts said, “I understand your writing has garnered some attention, but how exactly would you, in your early thirties, have any papers that a university library would be interested in collecting?”
The author said he shared Roberts’s surprise and paraphrased the special-collections librarian: because he’d been “particularly precocious,” her phrase, and because in his twenties he had co-edited a small and now-defunct but influential literary magazine, they suspected he might already be in possession of a “mature archive.” Moreover, collecting practices were changing, and papers were now often sold in increments. They’d buy, let’s say, a third of the author’s papers now, then acquire the other two installments across the years. Since he would presumably want all his papers in one place, there was an institutional interest in establishing a relationship early, to invest in him. The author pronounced “papers” in a way that made it clear he was placing the word in quotes.
“And do you have a ‘mature archive’?” Roberts asked. He seemed to like the phrase.
“No,” he said. “Almost all the correspondence about the magazine was e-mail, and I had a different e-mail account for much of that time. I never printed anything. What I do have is boring, logistical. And in terms of my own work”—he was trying not to place “work” in quotes—“I don’t write by hand and don’t save drafts on the computer.”
“What do you have?”
“Oh, massive and obsessive electronic correspondence with my best writer friends that’s poorly written and full of gossip and shit-talking and divulges all manner of embarrassing information. I have
a folder full of postcards from authors, some of them famous, politely thanking me for sending them my book.”
“Do libraries buy e-mails?”
“Apparently they’re starting to. Electronic archives. She said everything is changing as the technology changes. But they wouldn’t want anything I have. And I wouldn’t want anyone to see it, even after I’m dead.”
Roberts made a pause that italicized the author’s last four words, silence that had the same effect as repetition.
“A year ago, this would have been weird and silly and flattering, their interest, and now it seems like some institutional premonition that I’m going to die.”
“There is no evidence that your condition is going to worsen,” Roberts repeated, without impatience, for the thousandth time.
“I’m also surprised to find,” the author said, ignoring him, “that I want to have ‘papers,’ want to leave and be left those traces, that it would authenticate me.”
Roberts made the pause that meant “Go on.”
* * *
He had told the story so many times that slight variations crept in. He couldn’t recall the exact sequence of events. For instance, had he found a message the day after the extractions saying he should call the dentist as soon as possible, or did he answer a call directly from the dentist that afternoon? Either way, the day after the procedure, a week before his scheduled follow-up, he was standing beside the window, staring at the clock tower on Hanson Place, cell phone to his ear, listening to the dentist say there was a problem with his X-ray. “There is a problem with my X-ray,” he repeated with his sore mouth. The dentist said he happened to be reviewing the file and there was an area that concerned him. “You are concerned about my teeth,” the author confirmed. “I want you to see a neurologist,” the dentist replied. There was a full beat before the dentist said, “Everything will be fine, I think.”
