Elise Blackwell - Grub

For months, Henry Baffler struggled with his “open” novel, refusing to admit, even as page stacked upon page, that the book was going nowhere. With Bailiff , he’d intended the plot to go nowhere, for the book to circle back around to where it began and leave his plump protagonist unchanged. But that was not a formula he wanted to repeat. Repetition was death to art — that is what he’d read and what he believed. Besides, while he wanted this novel to unfurl rather than to move linearly, he certainly did not want it to be circular or static. The winter months were elasticized agony, as the very meaning of open raced away from him each time he pursued it.

When the phone call came, he had not yet conceded defeat, had not yet admitted that this might be the novel that he would always want to write but never would. The call was from a curator at MUCA, the Museum of Ultra-Contemporary Art, who wanted to gage his interest in being part of an exhibit on living novelists.

“Exhibit of living novelists,” the man corrected himself.

Three novelists were being invited to live in the museum — on display — for one month, during which time they were each to compose a novel of at least fifty thousand words. The idea that this event might attract the attention of Clarice Aames, or at least the officers of ulcer, occurred to Henry, and he agreed to the small stipend and other terms.

“Let us know what you need in terms of typewriter or computer. To prevent the emailing or downloading of work-in-progress, there will be no internet access. You can bring no notes or books, only yourself, a few changes of clothes, and your toiletries.”

“Even better,” said Henry. “I won’t even come with an idea.”

“Perfect!” the curator said, with a glee that was either genuine or convincingly faked.

Two weeks later, Henry arrived at MUCA with a small suitcase boxing all his clothes and bathroom items. The other two novelists waiting in the museum foyer were not such light packers. The first was a woman of about fifty, wearing silk parachute pants tucked into some sort of cross between a sneaker and a knee-length boot. Her white tee shirt was weighed down with a dozen silver necklaces, and she was standing next to three very large suitcases. “It looks like a lot,” she said, “but I have to carry my own bedding and towels. Chemical sensitivities.”

The other novelist was a much younger woman, probably not even twenty-five. She was so drained of color that Henry inspected her to determine whether she was actually albino, but he discerned a trace of blue in her irises and the occasional blonde hair in her white eyelashes. She was as thin as Henry and her cowboy boots looked enormous under cinched up jeans and a man’s dress shirt.

“They don’t exist,” she said. “Those New Age magazines try to get you to obsess about gluten and dust mites and simplicity so that you won’t notice that the corporations who publish them are destroying our culture.”

“Hmm.” The older woman quivered a smile and fingered one of the silver medallions on her sternum.

Henry backed away a few steps and was relieved to see a man approaching. Though dressed like someone in his twenties, he looked to be in his late thirties. He tucked his hair behind his ears before shaking Henry’s hand.

“Pete,” he said, “I’m the curator of the exhibit.”

“The exhibit,” Henry repeated.

The writers were, indeed, an exhibit, though not an especially popular one — and considerably less popular than the fecal art show whose patrons they could hear through the temporary wall separating the two sections of the museum. Each writer had a platform with a twin bed, dresser, desk, and chair. Henry had asked for a computer, since it was free. The women had opted for manual typewriters — Maia on the grounds that metal was less allergenic than plastic and Rhiannon because typewriters used fewer of the world’s dwindling petrochemical resources.

They were not allowed to leave the museum, though they were given regular food and bathroom breaks during the day. After hours they were allowed to use the employee areas, including the showers and lounge, but their contracts required them to sleep in the exhibit.

“I know that writers often sleep late,” said Pete, “and there’s no reason for you to get up before the museum opens. In fact, I think some of our patrons might find sleeping novelists more interesting than novelists-at-work.”

Maia lasted three days before breaking her contract on the grounds of eye strain due to florescent lighting and the presence of more artificial materials in her living space than had been represented to her.

“I guess it’s just you and me now,” Henry said to Rhiannon that evening.

“What page are you on?” she snapped.

“We have the whole month,” Henry replied. “I don’t think it’s a competition.”

“When your parents name you after a shitty pop song, everything’s a competition.” Her pale eyes glared at him through the black eyeliner.

Unsure how to respond, he tried: “Do you like Clarice Aames?”

The brightening effect was immediate. “I love her. Have you read ‘Lethal’ yet?”

Later that night, over the millet and tempeh that Rhiannon had requested for their dinner, she told him the story of her childhood guinea pig. “If you don’t breed a female guinea pig before she’s about seven or so months old, you should never breed her, because her pelvic bones fuse.”

Henry nodded, noticing that her nose was perfectly straight, evenly dividing her not unpleasant face.

“We didn’t know, and I let the male into the pen one day. Evangeline got pregnant and I was all excited about the cute babies she would have. But her bones wouldn’t open and the babies couldn’t get out and she died.” Rhiannon grinned. “Leave it to Clarice to top that guinea-pig story. ‘Lethal’ was incredible.”

“That’s a terrible story. Yours, I mean.” He added that he was sorry, but it sounded like a question.

She shrugged. “My parents gave the male to a pet store, which probably sold him to some snake owner. We kept cats after that.”

“Do you write about your family?”

She shook her head grimly. “Autobiographical fiction should be killed if it’s not dead already.”

“I agree.” Henry resisted the compulsion to touch her colorless hair.

Their friendship grew across the weeks, though Rhiannon remained competitive about page counts and wouldn’t tell him what she was working on. “It’s kind of a labor novel,” was the most she would say.

Henry worked away on his tale of a blind child — probably a boy though he refrained from using a gendered name or pronoun — living near a landfill with an alcoholic, deaf parent, probably the mother. He thought of it as meta-fiction: a comment on the state of the contemporary novel.

While the exhibit was not popular, it drew a handful of viewers, including a repeat visitor who never took off his Yankees cap and tried to taunt the writers into talking to him, which they were forbidden to do.

“I feel like a zoo animal,” Rhiannon said to Henry one night.

“No,” said Henry. “We’re museum pieces. The novel itself is a museum piece. How can we deign to write long narratives in this fractured world? It’s fitting that we are an exhibit. We’re history. Long live the death of the novel.”

“I have a confession,” she said after a pause. “I’m writing a novel-in-flash-fictions.”

“That’s a brilliant idea.” Henry reached for her bony hand.

“Except,” she smiled, “they don’t really go together. It’s really not a novel at all.”