[A pop song plays, you know the one, and lights come up to reveal two men sitting on wooden chairs opposite each other. One smiles, and leans forward.]
Bernard Montgomery: Good evening. As part of our Readers Come First series, we’re here to conduct an interview with a character you’re about to read. Tonight I have next to me Charles Kendron. Charles? Welcome.
Charles Kendron: Thanks for having me. [They shake hands.]
Bernard Montgomery: Tell me, Charles, have you ever worked on a Sam Simurgh story before? I hear he’s great.
Charles Kendron: No, I haven’t, but I’m looking forward to the experience. I’ve heard a lot about him, too — that he’s a thrill to work with. You’re not a narrator by chance, yourself, are you?
Bernard Montgomery: Me? No, no. I’m here to help.
Charles Kendron: Help?
Bernard Montgomery: Tell us about your character.
Charles Kendron: Well, I’m a 28 year old bike-courier. He’s a good guy, and … Hmm.
Bernard Montgomery: A full-time courier?
Charles Kendron: Full time, yes. That’s an interesting pin you’ve got there.
Bernard Montgomery: Yes. A swan.
Charles Kendron: Does it have any special meaning, or —?
Bernard Montgomery: Oh! Looks like we’re getting the cue from the reader that it’s time to start the story. Sorry, Kendron, but we’ve got to go. Thanks for stopping by.
Charles Kendron: It’s been nice talking to you.
Bernard Montgomery: Nice talking to you, too. [They shake hands.] Good luck.
The Reinventionists
by Evan Fleischer
Starring: Charles Kendron, and Sam Simurgh
Presented in TECHNICOLOR.
I am a Professional Narrator.
If you don’t believe my authoritative capitalization, here’s my business card:
Sam Simurgh, Professional Narrator
Narrational Musings, 3rd Division, A
120 W 78 George Washington Ave.
NY, NY. 03832
I’ve been in ‘The Biz’ for six years, so I’m ready for tricks, analysis, and the gaggles of pseudo-Freudian reactionism. You have to expect it; the last story I did was a biography of Douglas MacArthur’s time in the Philippines, and a woman wrote me — my colleagues think it’s a joke, and I agree — that the “author shows a tropical vacation, army-commanding, being-fed-individual-grape-wish complex, not to mention a perverted obsession with starvation, a danger, Sirs, that should be treated more lightly in our tragically poverty-ridden society.” Embarrassingly enough, I had forgotten my lunch that day, but the woman is daft to pin me as mad for MacArthur. Call me a magician with cakes, bunnies, and doves a-plenty in my hat, but please pay attention to the show.
And what a show it promises it to be: there shall be lights, explosions, and swashbuckling sword battles up a tightly coiling staircase! Thrill to the sight of machine guns, crocodiles, and the coolly close-cut face of stiff-jawed cowboys! Chill at the Kafkaesque obliqueness adorning the gray blocks of our fair city, peppered with wry, pop culture cynicism! And scream, scream in horror at the unfurling hordes of zombies, whose skin drips like wet paint; howl at the vicious unreality of the ghoulish gouge of a vampire’s bite; and clutch the sides of these pages lest you dare roam the waking and walking terror without a firm grasp of security.
Our story begins in an office.
Narrational Musings is located on the 67th floor of the Byron Building, between a sword manufacturer on the 68th and an advertising firm on the 66th, a block away from Central Park. Every morning 1,001 narrators sieve to their desks, turn on their monitoring equipment, and begin — or continue — to tell a story. The office is divided into two primary sections: the reception area, and the work area, where the storytellers work. There are three storytelling centers located in the workplace, all close together, occupying the majority of the floor space, while the dining area, kitchen, and executive room are placed side-by-side along the north wall. Each center has three sections of 111 auteurs. (The remaining two work in the fancy office.) All three sub-divisions share a costume and prop rack, which bisects the square of cubicles that marks our specific center. All the sections are grouped according to their interests. No one goes near the water-coolers. As an office full of storytellers, we stay away out of superstition.
We have no library. This may come as a surprise to first-time narrators, but our solution is elegant and simple. All furniture is made of books, as are the cubicle walls. This is something that was requested by the toppers — Pinel Tuke, Houston Ottofrei, and Beria Rentvoly — and it’s something I’ve learned to like, along with their names. (Jesus!) They were installed over a six-day period by a group of Borgesians, who have always traditionally ended up next to the Calvinists at the yearly conferences, despite the alphabetical difference. It always happens, and no one knows how, but between reader and narrator, let it be said that the Borgesians do happen to have their share of a sense of humor.
And now we join our shaman, your humble narrator, coffee in hand, scratching my cheek with the tip of a rolled-up newspaper as I leave the white-tiled cafeteria replete with phosphorescent lamps, and, astride twenty-foot windows, walk straight to the 3rd center.
A portly gentleman of the highest moral fiber with a thick, curvaceous mustache is leaving the 3rd center peering at a folder. I raise my cup in greetings. “Morning, Lionel.”
“Lionel turned, and let his gaze rest upon a bespectacled, freshly balding sheen of a hunch-shouldered suit-and-tie, the vestiges of youth slowly siphoning —”
“Already walked by, Lionel.”
I’ve got a little posse I like to visit — chroniclers, activists, nonsensicalists, shy guys, bravado trumpets — and their activities break down thusly: wild man Frank finds it hard to stick to his desk, and likes to wanderfoot around the office hoping for Byronic (“Ironic Thricefold,” he says) inspiration to strike so he can scribble notes on whatever he finds within pen-tip’s reach: napkins, his calendar, or those black leather notebooks issued free by the company. Why, he even managed to squeeze a few lines onto a sugar packet, once, a tiny little story about the sugar packet’s life before he opened it up and pored it into his coffee. He has a nervous twitch of jumping on certain words and breaking them down into a cluster of corresponding words and nonsense syllables, i.e., cat = thcat, krcat, lcat, rcat-ta-tatta-cat.
“Hey, Simurgh.” George is offering a folder. George, the Third Division Boss, all whirling, flabby arms and chin-heavy grin, sleeves rolled up at nine in the humid A.M., is giving a tour to the latest comers-on, kids fresh out of college emerging from the reception and elevator area into the main foyer. Once the crowd overtakes my mouth at the coffee watering hole of a cup, he speaks again. “
George will double-check on the files later today at the Quadrant Meeting. The Quadrant Meeting is a daily occurrence. When 10:30 rolls around, we in our quadrants roll to the meeting. We go over the day’s activities, distribute necessary workloads, and see how we’re doing on ‘The 36.’
The 36 is shorthand for 36 plot points — the 36 plot points. Each quadrant has to hit a certain number of stories featuring a certain number of points by the end of each quarter.
There are also donuts at the meeting, as well as small candies and free coffee.
Markos Fielding is an intense man. Not only did he used to threaten people with a round of ‘furious fists’ when they told him that, no, parking really was free on Sunday, he also used to hide in Village Voice Newspaper boxes, pop out and offer that week’s edition to approaching customers — “Here you go,” he’d say.
Today Markos has his back up against the wall leading into the mail room.
“Sometimes I feel like a platter of cheese at a wine tasting party.”
“That’s nice, Gouda.”
“Markos.”
“Right. Markos.”
I like to give him a hard time. Here’s hoping he’ll smile.
Joseph I.L. wasn’t even a one-book writer: he got halfway through his first, then implanted robotic legs on the underside of the page. The book followed Joseph around, now, and had a chirpy bark. It barked a greeting at me as it slop-footedly followed Joseph around a corner as I made the final turn.
My office is gray felt. Tacked underneath the name-tag and Far Side cartoons, the day’s assignments: a haiku on cracking your knuckles, a criollismo aubade for a history textbook, and one short story. Easy workload. A poster on the opposite cubicle wall: a cat hanging by one front paw off a branch, the phrase Les Sang Des Poets underneath.
Thom’s cubicle is directly behind mine. Our doorways face each other. This position has left me open to a number of attacks, from rolled up pieces of paper off the back the head to removing just enough screws from the top of my chair to keep it on until my sitting weight knocked it off and gravity pulled me over in a possum-like arc. He likes history, himself — he went to school for it, and loves to drop little anecdotes, his favorite being, “When Eisenhower heard about Pearl Harbor, he was out in the backyard. His wife came out and told him what happened, and without saying a word, silent as anything, he went into his kitchen and made soup.” It relaxed him, Thom said. He couldn’t remember what type of soup it was.
“Knock, Knock, Thom.” Office posture #12: lower arm pulled close to the upper arm, resting atop the wall that surrounds the cubicle.
“Good morning, Sam!’
“Thom — you’re — I can’t help but — you’re a … minotaur.”
Thom throws his hooves up on the desk.
“It’s the last day of Mythology Month. Everyone gets to dress up as a creature.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.”
He fruffs his nostrils. “Shame. You could’ve had fun.”
“Well, anyway, what’ve you got there, Thom?”
“This?” He held it up like a pocket watch. “This is an ant with a string attached to it. Do you know what for?”
If larger bones snap
As easily as fingers
Disgust Level: High
“I said, ‘Do you know what this is for?’”
“What?” Blink the eyes. Shake the head. “No. No, I don’t.”
He gives me a long look, and says, “That’s a shame. Anyway, here’s a schedule of events, so you won’t miss anything.”
I’ve the calendar clipping in my hand as I go, advertising the upcoming and “hotly anticipated” Hawaiian Shirt Month.
I’ll set the haiku down soon enough, but in the meantime, fetch us a cup to toast the muse of fire, archetypal barmaid! Out, out piece of paper, slide into the top of the monitor, and with angels living in every lightness and souvenir kiosk a-chant, Bacchus leaping atop a table to lead a hall full of warriors in song, fireworks raining, I dive t’the thrumdrumming, hyperlinked heartstrings, where the earth’s surface is elastic, and each step a vibration:
Upstate New York, bizarrely close to Manhattan. Six to seven businesses makes for a town center. Two or three kids like to hang around the local pizza joint to watch a friend go down eroding steps one wheel at a time. Cars pull into the local drug store to grab lottery tickets and groceries. Very few walk about. But ten minutes away from the center, heading off to a larger seaside community, a concrete road, dilapidated with age, parallels a river. 117 miles long. Two dozen streams tie into the river. Gentle breeze. 37 woodchucks, 18 wrens, and a canary.
Here on River Road, Charles Kendron, atop his courier bike, clove a stick in two.
Two cars, one yipping after the other, drag themselves through gravel and around the rider. Cold air keeps Kendron’s head and blood aloft to see a gal with a cartoon character backpack — Suzie Sue running back to the house to give her parents a clump of mail; one house down, Mrs. Walltack, with her head buried in the garden, her shorts watching the road; and on his left, across the street, a transparent curtain of beech trees that keep the Plurabelle River in sight as it runs down to the Hudson. Bluebells and wild hyacinths offset the trees’ green glow. When the curtain comes up, and Charles waits for this, the trees on the opposite bank shoot up into the sky. They are hailing a traveler. They are the unexplored country. Each tree is a giant statue buried in the side of a mountain.
Fifteen minutes later, Charles swings off his bike, and makes his way up a cobblestone path to the doorway of a house marked by the uneven placement — the swelling and sinking points of — the wood all about the corners of the house. Contrary to the road, now the russet red makes a dissonant glow against the hyacinth and green trees. He raps the businessman’s triplet on the door. Footsteps, trying to make their way to the front of the house, not quite certain, it seems, by the direction they’re taking, of the fact that someone has, yes, they have, knocked at the door, and just wants to get their glasses to be sure if they’re where they last left them. The back door behind the screen clicks, opens. An old woman, Mrs. Teaslie, according to his information, white hair, crooked neck, and a full-body flower dress where the prints have whitened with age, she’s the one who looks behind Charles while he’s handing his clipboard over, saying, “Package,” and screams.
The screamed-at object in question was female, of indeterminate age, and wore a light-refracting green tunic. It budges and poofs with the knees and feet of her step, and stops just short of her neck, which has an adam’s apple’s covering of pearls. Her hair lifts up with the wind, though Charles can’t feel any, nor see any plants that react in similar fashion. She also carries a spear in her hand. Whenever she presses a button, the tip spits out a bit of fire. Charles’ eyebrows went roofward.
But before he can say anything, the mysterious woman presents a butter knife and intones, “O Knight, Take this Thy Sword, fetted from the fingertips of my father and lord, and go you hunting upon the groundswell, whereof you’ll find winsome boar.”
Charles wasn’t used to this kind of talk, and — in his early stages of worry — became intractably polite.
“Oh, I’ve got plenty of boar at home already.” He grins. “Sorry.”
“But —” She gestures with the knife. “Wouldn’t you want to —?”
“This is a butter knife.”
“With which you will slay.”
“The lack of blade makes me think I’d be using a tuning fork.”
“So tune them to death.”
“I’ve just seen a friend, actually.” Charles walks by the woman, and up the path toward the road. Turning around, he can see the old woman’s had enough sense to take the package, sign, and go inside. “I’ve got to go.”
“What about a match? Can I interest you in a match?”
Charles had left his bike locked to a tree, where it and a dog stared each other down. He picks it up off the tree, and peddles away. The dog sits, content with victory.
The name of the woman in green is Celia Longyellow. She works in the same cluster as myself, and likes to tease me with having read Mallarme and Moliere in the original French — which she picked up on her own, unprompted, when she was fourteen.
When it’s a Timed Delivery instead of a normal excursion, and he finds himself within striking distance of the house but relatively early, he’ll find a grassy patch, sit down, pop out a book and thermos, and read. He finds extraordinary pleasure in the space between the destination points of his delivery. If “A” and “B” made an extension bridge, he wouldn’t care how high he’d have to climb, or deep he’d have to dip. He was a traveler.
The river’s low in the summer heat, fish eyeballin’ the encroaching glare. Algae is visible on the woodwork that supports the bridge as Kendron crosses from woods to the northernmost outskirts of Harlem, heading south.
He often anthropomorphized his bike (the partial list includes the voice of Sid Barrett, an angry pirate, a fatherly bicycle claiming that this was an unorthodox piggyback ride, or anything that could sing). This was a joyous pastime. It led to all sorts of adventures. (One couldn’t ride and elephant with wheels throughout Manhattan without experiencing a sense of adventure …) Sometimes the bike became an elephant, and Kendron would sit on top, waving his arms as he, the prince, passed waving little grass blades of people below. Other times Kendron thought himself the driver of the world’s thinnest steam-roller. Whatever came to mind.
Someone taps my shoulder, and I look away from the monitor and story. It’s Thom. He has a black square object in hand.
“Antecedent tape. Thought you might want to take a look at it.”
Reviewing Antecedent Tapes is a thrill for narrators. Why? Things look funny backwards. One of the greatest parts of my job is to watch a baby sucked back into the womb like it was at the mercy of a vacuum. To see everything that has happened to that character up until your narration!
“I’ll take that as a thank you.”
The tapes are compiled by the guys in research who have access to complete, unedited footage of all subjects reaching back to the early 1900’s. They’ll sit and watch, scribbling down the time mark on the reel when they’ve found something. And then it hinges on editor’s preference. We’re free to look over the notes and impressions of the viewing (both taped and written) to see what we’ve missed, if anything, and off we go.
Popping it in, I see: a Mother and a Father. Blue hospital smocks everywhere. Bleary-grinned Mother and eye-frazzled Father. Laced pillows with sing-song phrases. Blowing out the birthday candle for the kid, who thinks the light’s another part of hide-and-seek (if we can read anything by the grin). It’s Christmas now, with the kids of the family skittering/scadoodling about in red and green sweaters, the fathers, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, and grandparents staking places by desk-chairs, couches, with a few trying to imitate the posture of their wine glasses, like they were about to be handed out as an award. The kid stomping after the family camera, arms outstretched, and he’s asking the same question, over and over. “Dadd-y, can I hold the cam-er-a? Can I hold the cam-er-a? Can I hold the cam-er-a?” I see the Father carrying the kid in a backpack through a local park. Both turn and make their eyes go comically wide. Then the Father starts picking up different leaves, and presents them in a fan above his head. Once the kid’s got ‘em, his giant hands reach up and drumrattle both sides of leaf-boy’s noggin. Asleep on the couch, not stirring, his mouth slowly pops open. Class graduation: the youngsters are all drained to vacancy, except the kid, whose feet bouncing and eye-shifting to look at, not skim over, the beginning driplets of drool on the boy’s slackjaw mouth sitting next to him. Baseball. Soccer. School play. I see: High School: pointing, upset, at a frisbee he’s thrown on the roof; someone hands him another frisbee, which he turns around and tosses onto the roof, then back to the camera, where he makes a pouty face again. Playing trumpet, and taking a solo while some pint-sized cheeks of a crooner runs through a series of steps to kill the time while he holds the microphone stand like an ink pen excavated in the year 3000. Frisbees come raining down off the roof as cars and busses pull out of the lot. Horns honk and wail. Family Vacation to New York. “Hello from Lincoln Center! Where myself and the fountain are” — right on cue — “one!” High School Diploma. The guy behind him throws his hat into the air, and some alum throw theirs, too. Slowly burying himself in sand at the beach. Tries to throw a ball for him to catch, but he unearths his feet in the process. Another beach. Mountain-top views from the blurring smokefire of a camp. Moving into the parallel cots of a dorm room. Videos of D.C. sent back to the parents, illustrating the number and variety of greystone monuments in the city. Green camera blacklight with whitespot eyes making their way through the field of Korean soldiers. Cherry Blossoms. Birthdays. Graduating from college. Dinner party at the new apartment. Boxes for chairs. Then videos of his feet, a lamp, two dogs barking at each other from across the street, a sputtering of tape, and silence.
The tape’s being flipped in my hand like a coin when Frankie knocks at the door and I realize that the space between the end of the tape and his knock was eliminated by a shapeless, formless, content-free revelry. What would’ve filled that space, were there content?
But Frankie! Frankie’s in a top-hat, and riding a stage coach. I don’t quite know how he got a horse up the elevator.
He offers a tip of his hat. He and his mustache share a smile. “Might I offer you a ride to lunch, gov’na’?”
“Look at you, you muppet! Naff off! Can’t you see I clearly enjoy dossing around, hanging on t’my chips with everythin’?” I climb aboard the carriage.
My first meeting with Frank was by no means auspicious:
Frank: Oh, you’re just moving in?
Myself: Yeah. First day.
Frank: Name’s Frank.
Myself: Sam Simurgh [They shake hands.] But call me Sam.
Frank: Ho, ho! Moby Dick fan?
Myself: … What?
Frank: … You said —
Myself: Oh, right. ‘Call me —.’ Gotcha.
Frank: …
Myself: No. Not so much.
Frank: [Hands go to pockets.] Well, what do you write, Sam?
Myself: Oh, you know, a little of this, a little of that.
Frank: Oh, yes! Yes, I do.
Myself: And yourself?
Frank: Fiction! Fiction. “Mirror to nature,” and all that.
Since then, it was small things at an even smaller pace. Spending five minutes staring at the muffins stacked in a wicker basket in the break room. The tints and shades of the raisins depending upon how close they were to the surface of the muffin. Falling asleep on the subway on the way home. Noting how no one picks up the free newspapers left outside reception, save a scant few. Being able to say to others that you were able to notice a distinct change in pitch in the joints to the bathroom door you noticed one afternoon, after working at this place for who knows how long.
And then the lunch-time routine, which involved Frankie arriving on motorcycles, miniaturized greyhound buses, and — who knows who he got to make this — elephants wearing t-shirts that said, “I’m with Hannibal.” Today: the phaeton.
The ride is slow-going. In the name of authenticity and research, the hallways are always filled with costumes and sounds, writers re-enacting the scene before they commit it to page. Atilla the Hun asks directions from a speechifying Lenin, who is encircled by a party of the middle-aged middle-class constantly having affairs, while a hunchback carries a tiny, Christmas-loving boy atop his shoulder to get him a better view of a muzzle-painted goat with a tire wrapped around its body.
The horse trots around the center of the workspace: a giant fountain. Not but four inches away from the water’s tip lays the bottom of the chandelier, so that the two mirrored the other, one in water, the other light. A mirrored cake.
A squadron of soldiers bootrush past. “The Battle of the Bulge — mind George’s tour, men — began — don’t use your gun on the newbies, please, at least until they get their own — Dec. 16, 1944. Note how the uniforms have changed from the first World War to the Second. Now, squad, the Ardennes, which are found in Belgium, have a particularly specific geography, where — and the 23rd Airborne from Boinseville, Ohio would very much appreciate it if a group of Victorians didn’t flouncy-flounce their way through to the ball at the local manor, thank you very much.”
Three headless horsemen run behind the carriage, sans horse, playing tag, and nearly crash into the Victorians. “What happens if we tag other people and they don’t want to play?” shouts one. Another runs into a cubicle wall. “I don’t know!” He replies.
I pick up a volume from Frankie’s satchel, which rests at his feet.
“What’s this?”
“Letters to a Dead Rilke.”
The carriage stops at a cubicle with seagull cutouts ringing the doorframe. I hop off the carriage. Suzie must’ve seen me coming, though, for she greets me with what I think to be a non-sequitur.
“I am trying to grow a tree in my office.” Tiles and carpet are torn up around a thin branch of a kiwi tree.
“I used to make tree houses when I was younger,” she continues. “So you can just think of the office below seeing roots come down through the ceiling.”
“It finally gives people who throw water at the ceiling something to do.”
“Jackson Advertising: We Have Tree Roots In Our Ceiling.”
“Oh, food. Do you want anything from the ‘fteria?” She shakes her head ‘no.’ “Well, I’ll be over there, — I’ll be with Frank, if you’d care to join. We can hold a satyr play with animal crackers, if you’d like …”
“No, no. I’m goin’ to kick it with my tree for a bit. Plus — me already ate.”
Suzie is usually the first to open up the office. She likes to take the time to read, she says, scanning the morning paper covered in fantastic drawings whose origins she refuses to divulge. Little dragons swing from the headlines, scorching words that run, screaming, to the sanctuary of the advice columns. Headlines take out knives, and circle each other as classified ads cheer them on (other ads cheer just to draw attention to themselves). Baseball players surf from first to second, and government officials often speechify in the Automotive section. (The most frequent comment she gets is someone leaning over to say, ‘Why is it the New York Time?’)
Her stories are still written out on a typewriter, and she likes to drag it everywhere with her, like a taxidermic pet, even though she lost the carrying case for it ages ago, so she’ll be belly-down kicking her feet back and forth behind her as she head-on-chin-restingly stares at what she’s got so far underneath the windows that sweep the expanse of the city. That type of posturing led to a short prose poem of hers that was spiky, lung-crushing, and something I memorized: “A giant skysnake of clouds slinked itself across the top of skyscrapers, shedding its skin, yellow like an aging book.”
By contrast, Thom writes scenes of dialogue on his desk, and likes to claim he started The Great Table Epic* in the cafeteria, where corresponding characters and scenes were found penciled in on a few of the tables by Suzie one morning, and then everyone spent the rest of the workday filling in and out what they could, calling across to fellow narrating-friends to ask them what they were in the middle of, what was happening to whom, and where they were planning to go with it. A few times deliberate misinformation was shared — the most obvious ones were knocked aside — ‘I thought Gerald was a man’ —, which was either for laughs, to challenge other writers to find a solution to the problem, or both. Most of us decided to work together, as the whatness of the tables as objects kept the conversation from swaying to the realm of whose story was whose and who owned it.
Frankie and I pulled up alongside the cafeteria, discussing our day’s stories.
“I have a fascinating case of a couple leading a Chekov gray sort of life when all of a sudden, I find out that the dog has hired a hitman, but before Caesar can say “Yahtzee!” the dog is caught trying to fake his owners’ deaths by strategically placing two skeletons in the bathtub locked in a mortal embrace, and where did he get the skeletons? From the bones he’s saved over the years. But since the dog doesn’t speak, the husband just thinks that he opened a door to a bathroom he’s never used before, or it must be some kids from the museum pulling a prank, so while he’s looking the dog grabs some dental floss and sneaks up behind him, and — I’m sorry, I’m sorry. How rude of me to speak so long. I apologize. What’s your story about?”
“My guy rides a bike. And drops off packages.”
“Oh. Wow. I really set you up there, didn’t I?”
“A bit.”
“I’ll have to do that more often.”
*An excerpt:
Beowulf: Male Nurse, is what the name tag read. Aside from the traditional blue smock, the man sported a leonine coat, complete with a stuffed head for a hoodie. He entered into Room 13B looking at his clipboard, broadsword dragging along the ground. The patient awoke.
“Hello, breakable mortal. I’m Beowulf, male nurse. How may I assist your inj — help your injury alon — can I get you an edible sandwich?”
The patient — frocked with bed-head — shook his head in the negative.
“Thank you, Beowulf —”
“Male Nurse.”
“You know, when I was younger, I always liked to try and peak at what strangers were reading on the subway.”
Frankie perks his forehead up. He sits back down. “Yeah?”
“But I only found odd titles, like The Vampyres Attack Dune, How Vico Secretly Invented The Hoola-Hoop, John Updike Gave Me The Middle Finger, Humboldt’s Gift-Wrapped, A Good Joke About A Good Man is Hard to Find is Hard to Find, A Teleconference of Birds (“Tokyo, you there?” “Yup.” “Germany, you there?” “You guys get that epiphany faxed over to you this morning?” “We all got it.” “Yup.” “Good! Good. How’s the wife?”), a little-known novel called Ben Franklin Regrets Inventing the Pun, Richard Nixon Loves You More Than You’ll Ever Know, Zagat’s Guide to Life-Threatening Restaurants, and a blank page entitled Sam Beckett and John Cage Fight to the Death.”
I’m given the reward of a high-five upon my conclusion. Looking around, I see no one else who could be invited over to the table. We knock off Ulysses over the rest of lunch. In troibo ad altare Dei, a shout in the street, Nothung.
On the way back to my office, Laura walks by in the middle of a conversation of her cell phone, spins her upper torso toward me, and does a finger-snap-and-point. “Simurgh, I’ve to leave early. I need to pick my kid up from school. When I go, do you think you could keep a watch on my story and just switch the p.o.v. ‘til I get back?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“All right. I don’t want to take you away from your story, though. You sure you’re okay with this?”
“Okay? Absolutely. I’ll be fine.”
A fistful of canaries hop around some fallen change covered in a rain puddle that’s nearly dried up. His next delivery’s an apartment complex right next to the store. He handthumps the buzzer. No one. Leaves the package at the door. Side-saddles the bike for a few feet, swings over the middle, and peddles down the road. Charles cranes his neck to look behind —
Then something failed, and the screen went blank.
*
One year the answer to neatly tie together art and life seemed simple: we glued together the brains of a batch of Harvard Lampoon Editors to our company’s reprint of Freud’s Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, along with a note that said, “It’s all here,” and shipped it to booksellers nationwide. Not only were we decried as murders, as inhumane, vacuous beasts; not only was the binding insulted with the soft, zipping whine of verbal spitballs (“Your reading apparatus doesn’t even fold over the entire brain!” “My brain keeps fallin’ out. Can I get a new one?” “Sirs, your choice of symbolism I find far more ineffectual and lackluster than your previous works.”), but no one got the joke. Go figure.
*
The next morning, I walk to the office. It was a good morning to walk. Christmas trees — as soldiers (with elegant balance problems), as archways — lined the street. Today in the chapel they’re reading through the first half of “B” in the dictionary. I don’t want to go over to my sub-division. I’m sure they’ve found out. I make my way over to Research and Development.
I knock.
“What’s new, boys?”
Sampson emerges from behind a computer. I jump.
“Jesus, Sampson. I didn’t see you.”
“We’ve a new breakthrough in the Mexican-American novel!”
“Yeah? How’d you do it?”
“Well, I stood right on the border between the two countries, then I wrote my novel. “
“…”
“Where’s my MacArthur now, eh?”
*
We used to take baseball bats to tuna fish sandwiches and watch the contents explode over the driveways of Lexington, MA at one in the morning, me and my dear mine. The early days of Sam Simurgh — hello! — occurred in this. Sammy Gorkik would espouse the latest theory to espouse — that Jeeves and Wooster were based on a schizophrenic Englishman Wodehouse knew; that eggs that were cognizant enough to understand that they were about to be cooked poorly would collapse into themselves and disappear right there on the counter top — and I’d sit there and stare and imagine late nights on a city desk, fielding calls off a police scanner that I’d somehow be able to talk to, and Gregory would come out onto the porch and brag that he’d just managed to fit 121 coca-cola cans into a space that could only hold 15, and that would be the kick-off of the night.
The Rembrandt-styled silence we would sit in when someone entered a room: how she raised her arms and seemed to be walking on her tip-toes along a thin line of carpet even though his feet remained hidden; the easy bewitchment with the angles hair takes, the shifts of strands; this is about accidentally brushing your leg against someone else and getting home to see a pages-long email waiting to be read, detailing the virtues of “personal space”; about popping the balloon of that hyper-formal language that takes command of us like a ghost, or knowing when to hide your hands in your sleeves, raise your arms and say, “Judge, I’d like there to be a mistrial, as my hands seem to’ve disappeared”; the purr, What do you like?; this is about avoiding the faces that mistake you for someone you’re not, or worrying about whether those faces are true or not; this is about leaning into coats as the winter wind comes snarling down into the subway, prowling, looking for someone to take a whack at; it’s about dealing with what passes for someone else’s formal language when you no longer know the person (do you like it? dislike it? bow to it? play with it? start pretending you’re in the middle of one of China’s national epics, like Luo Chanzhong’s Romance of the Three Dragons?); about overhearing someone on the train see no comparable difference in their “intimacy issues” between their boyfriend, ex-husband, kids, two cats, and neighbor’s hypoallegenic dog …
Sunnyshine a.m was the heure de cloche, the wind hand-bombed nearby ships out to sea, and I lay gravity-pressed to the grass, the ochre-spewing summer continuing absolutely unabated, baby ducks colliding with each other at the base of a log behind the leader who was trying to decide whether to hop over it or go around, a beautiful woman walking a bicycle along the road in front of a wall of greenery in front of the shore.
