Jonathan Lethem: Lucky Alan: And Other Stories

We worked in bookstores, the only thing to do. Nobody who didn’t — and that included every one of our customers — knew what any of the volumes throbbing along those shelves was worth, not remotely. Nor did the bookstores’ owners. Clea and I were custodians of a treasury of sentences much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Though we mostly handled the books only by their covers (or paged briefly through to ascertain that no dunce had striped the pages yellow or pink with a Hi-Liter), we communed deeply with them, felt certain that only we deserved to abide with them. Any minute we’d read them all cover to cover, it was surely about to happen. Meanwhile, every customer robbed us a little. At the cash registers we spoke sentences tailored to convey our disdain, in terms so subtle it was barely detectable. If our customers blinked a little at the insults we embedded in our thank-yous, we believed they just might be worthy of the marvels their grubby dollars entitled them to bear away.

We disparaged modern and incomplete forms: gormless and garbled jargon, graffiti, advertising, text-messaging. No sentence conveyed by photons or bounced off satellites had ever come home intact. Punctuation! We knew it was holy. Every sentence we cherished was sturdy and biblical in its form, carved somehow by hand-dragged implement or slapped onto sheets by an inky key. For sentences were sculptural, were we the only ones who understood? Sentences were bodies, too, as horny as the flesh-envelopes we wore around the house all day. Erotically enjambed in our loft bed, Clea patrolled my utterances for subject, verb, predicate, as a chef in a five-star kitchen would minister a recipe, ensuring that a soufflé or sourdough would rise. A good brave sentence (“I can hardly bear your heel at my nape without roaring”) might jolly Clea to instant climax. We’d rise from the bed giggling, clutching for glasses of cold water that sat in pools of their own sweat on bedside tables. The sentences had liberated our higher orgasms, nothing to sneeze at. Similarly, we were also sure that sentences of the right quality could end this hideous endless war, if only certain standards were adopted at the higher levels. They never would be. All the media trumpeted the administration’s lousy grammar.

But we were chumps and we knew it. As makers of sentences we were practically fetal, beneath notice, unlaunched, fooling around in our spare time or on somebody else’s dime. Nobody loved our sentences as we loved them, and so they congealed or grew sour on our tongues. We barely glanced at our wall-scribblings for fear of what a few weeks or even hours might expose in our infatuations. Our photocopied fortune slips we’d find in muddy clogs in storm drains, tangled with advertising flyers, unheeded. Our manuscripts? Those were unspeakable secrets, kept not only from the world but from each other. My pages were shameful, occluded everywhere with xxxxxx’s of regret. I scurried to read Clea’s manuscript every time she left the apartment but never confessed that I even knew it existed. Her title was Those Young Rangers Thought Love Was a Scandal Like a Bald White Head . Mine was I Heard the Laughter of the Sidemen from Behind Their Instruments .

Others might hail kings of beer or burgers — we bowed to the King of Sentences. There was just one. We owned his titles in immaculate firsts and tattered reading copies and odd variant editions. It thrilled us to see the pedestrian jacket copy and salacious cover art on his early mass-market paperbacks: to think that he’d once been considered fodder for dime-store carousels! The newest editions of the titles he’d allowed to be reprinted (four early novels had been suppressed from republication) were splendidly austere, their jackets, from the small presses that published him now, bearing text only, no graven images. The progress of his editions on our shelf was like a cartoon of evolution, a slug crawling from the surf to become a mammal, a monkey, and then at last a hairless noble fellow gazing into the future.

The King of Sentences gave no interviews, taught nowhere, condescended to appear at no panels or symposia. His tastes, hobbies, and heartbreaks were unknown, and we extrapolated them from his books at our peril. His digital footprint was pale: people like that didn’t care about people like him. Google, for what it was worth, favored a famous painter of wildlife scenes — beaver dams, heron hideaways — with the same name. The King of Sentences only wrote, beavering away himself on a dam of quintessence, while wholly oblivious of public indifference and of a sales record by now likely descending to rungs occupied by poets. His author photograph, identical on twenty years of jackets and press clippings until it stopped circulating at all, arrested him somewhere in the mid-sixties, turtlenecked, holding a cocktail glass forever. His last cocktail, maybe.

In the same loft where we entangled, Clea and I drove ourselves mad reading the King of Sentences’s books aloud, by candlelight, when we ought to have been sleeping. We’d tear the book from each other’s hands for the pleasure of running his words like gerbils in the habitrails of our own mouths. We’d alternate chapters, pages, paragraphs, finally sentences, at last agree to read him in unison. He could practically hear us as we intoned his words, we’d swear they reached his ears. But not really. Really, we were vowing to ourselves and to each other that we’d make a day trip in search of the King of Sentences, that we’d flush him out, propel ourselves into his company and confidence, buoy him with our love and bind ourselves (and our secret manuscripts, oh yeah!) to his greatness. We each had what the other needed, of this we were positive. Maybe we’d watch him write. Maybe he’d watch us dance, or fuck, who knew? We’d buy him lunch. He was surely mortal enough for lunch. He’d want us at least for lunch.

He lived, we’d learned, north of the city, having drawn from his days as a Greenwich Village flaneur whatever inspiration he’d needed, and departed around the time of that last photograph and cocktail. (We figured that his departure from the narrow town house on Jane Street marked an expiration date on anything west of Second Avenue as an authentic locale.) Minimal detective work pinned him to a P.O. box in Hastings-on-Hudson — how clever and coy he had been to find a place-name that was itself, with the mere insertion of an apostrophe, a sentence, and a faintly lascivious one, too. So it was that we knew he’d summoned us to his hiding place: Clea could play Hudson, and I’d be Hasting.

We sent a postcard warning, addressed to his box. No return address, so he couldn’t refuse. No fancy sentences, fearing his judgment of those. Just fragments: “coming in two weeks,” “get ready,” “can’t wait to meet in person” (as if we’d already met on other planes, for we had). The appointed day came upon us like a sickness, and though each in our privacy might have preferred to stay in bed and sweat it out we couldn’t have looked each other in the eye if we hadn’t staggered out of doors, to the subway, up to Grand Central Terminal. During the short ride we held hands, fever-sweaty at the palms. Exiting Metro-North’s Hastings-on-Hudson station under a thundercloud-clotted sky, we found ourselves the sole travelers not claimed by family members waiting in Subarus or beeping their driver-side doors unlocked as they crossed the parking lot with cell phones clammed to their ears. The train continued on behind us, and the station depopulated as if neutron-bombed.

“This is the town of the King of Sentences.”

“This little town.”

“He could be watching us now, don’t act stupid. With a telescope.”

We blundered along something called Main Street, seeking the post office, until a passerby directed us to Warburton Avenue. Inside the mediocre lobby we staked out a position near the numbered boxes, innocuously pretending to screw up our change-of-address forms so that we had to start over again a dozen times. His box, which we surveilled with peripheral vision only, pulsed with risk and possibility — our own postcard had been handled there, a precursor to this encounter.