Rick Moody - The Diviners

Six minutes, eighteen seconds now, and Spicer is back at the Forty-ninth Street entrance to the R train, asking directions. He inquires of a young woman the kind of bagel she’s eating. He prefers the salt bagel, himself. Will only eat the salt bagel; well, also the onion bagel, and sometimes the bagel with everything, but all varieties of bagel must have lox upon them. Fresh lox. Spicer does not have a prayer of victory, does not have a chance.

Tyrone Duffy is singing “Up on the Roof” as though it were an allegory about elliptical orbits when he is again knocked from his bike, by a large pedestrian, apparently on purpose. That is, a force is impressed against the inert body of Tyrone Duffy, at point P, along velocity tangent F prime. This is Tyrone, about to make a turn on Forty-eighth, along which axis Worldwide Plaza moves into view, whereupon he is brought to a standstill by a certain pedestrian of malevolent intent. A large man, apparently of Mediterranean origin, and it seems this man has a problem with the institution of bicycle messengers, if messengers, as a marginalized populace, can be said to be institutional. A message is announced at the moment that force is impressed upon Tyrone: Something something, motherfuckers, something something. That Tyrone is heading the wrong way up Broadway is apparently inadvisable and contrary to etiquette and worthy of violent confrontation in the view of this pedestrian of Mediterranean origin.

“Broadway goes downtown, you ignorant piece of shit.”

Tyrone brushes himself off with Buster Keaton understatement. The man begins to assume the stance of a combatant. The preliminary stance of fisticuffs. The planets are complex. They are not of uniform cast.

“Whoa.” Tyrone mutters a reply, reaching for his glasses and his bandanna, which are scattered upon the curbside. A circle begins to form around the two men.

Another pedestrian says, “You were riding the wrong way!”

Soon a third and a fourth.

“Before the month is up, it will rain,” Tyrone says, well aware of his inexplicability. His bike is upended, the Mediterranean man is coming at him, and he can see the ring on the fifth finger of the hand of the Mediterranean man, a high school graduation bauble, and he can tell that this ring is about to make a deep impression on his cheek, and he can see that the circle of onlookers is like the plasma of the early universe, gathering energy. All he can think of is “inner force,” the notion that a body does what it is doing because of its inner force, and this force carries Tyrone on the glide, and the glide takes him from east to west and it takes him from north to south, and if the glide is good, then the day is good. This is his inner force. And if the glide is bad, then the day is bad, and all is darkness. The fist of the Mediterranean man is now, in roundhouse style, swung in his direction, and this blow falls across his face, and again his glasses go flying, and the bystanders, all of them white, hold Tyrone by the arms because they have all had infelicitous interactions with the centaurs of the empire. They have all had the centaurs drive them into other pedestrians, the centaurs riding the wrong way on one-way streets, the centaurs shouting at them, whistling on their centaur whistles, and now Tyrone is going to pay. One guy says, “Don’t you have anything to say?” and Tyrone thinks long and hard, and he says, “?198–157? v ~ (1/ R 2 ) x R 2 = 1,” and he says this with such clarity that it belies everything he has done or thought in weeks. He grins. The oppositional force of the Mediterranean man, with his outer-Brooklyn accent, makes Tyrone feel alive as he has not felt in weeks. It is true that if you had but fifteen minutes left to live, it would be most satisfying to have your hands around the neck of a white man, particularly a fat, detestable, middle-aged white man, and another blow comes now, and he attempts to kick the Mediterranean man centrally, but then a squad car pulls up close, and out come the cops, and Tyrone is let free as though never restrained. At once bystanders are consumed by the lobby ingresses of nearby buildings. “What seems to be the problem?” et cetera.

The collection of passersby that remains, significantly reduced, offers the unanimous perception that Tyrone was riding in the wrong direction on Broadway. All of these persons are unaware that Tyrone was solving elementary propositions of astrophysics. The cops slap a moving violation on Tyrone. The Mediterranean man gets clean away.

“That guy punched me in the face,” he says in his throaty whisper. “For no reason. And he knocked me off the bike and may have damaged my rims from throwing my bike around. You’re going to do nothing about that?”

The officers look at him as though he has just said?198–157? v ~ (1/ R 2 ) x R 2 = 1. They hand him the lightweight Mysterium Cosmographicum, and he limps the last block across, until he’s chaining the steed in front of Worldwide Plaza, from whence is now emerging Jack Spicer, retiree, parkinsonian patient, carrying a manila envelope. They nod.

Soon Tyrone Duffy calls into the message center at International Talent and Media and is told, of course, that he is redundant, as the package has already been picked up by an old guy. Salt is applied to the wound. On the sidewalk, he then telephones his sister. He tells her his new litany of sorrows. It’s almost impossible, he says, to get out of bed. Bed has some incredible electromagnetic convection, and he can’t get out of the bed, and he hasn’t eaten anything but Special K for three weeks because he’d rather read Spinoza or socialist-worker propaganda than boil an egg, and it’s always like that, the bad news piles up and rolls off his back, oh yeah, and he just bought a Harley-Davidson, and he’s going to disassemble it and mount it on the wall of his studio apartment.

“Hey, uh, I was supposed to bring some package by there, but I guess I didn’t get there in time. There was an incident.”

Annabel says the word honey like it is the first time the word has ever been used, like honey has just been discovered by a woodland animal. And then she whispers. To explain her own conundrum. To tell him about The Diviners, the treatment she typed last night, late into the night, and how a friend at a film agency agreed to send it over to Means of Production as though it were a genuine submission.

“Wait a second,” Tyrone mumbles. “You —”

“Made it up. With that guy. Thaddeus.”

Nothing to say about this. It’s clear that Thaddeus is a traditional Lothario with multiple sexually transmitted diseases and a death wish and a battalion of gossip columnists drunk on expense accounts tracking his every move.

“We’re gonna see if she goes for it.”

He asks the name of the author of the source material. Because there has to be an origin, even if it’s a fictive origin, or perhaps because it’s fictitious there has to be an origin. And she agrees that it’s a really good question. The name of the author. They picked a bunch of names of dead romance novelists. The stupider the novel, the better the film, Annabel says. A novel where the prose is so horrible it’s like the prose equivalent of mac and cheese in a box, that’s the ticket. Add in a deformity of some kind. Romance novelists, the people who write these things, have three names. Late in the evening, she and Thaddeus Griffin worked on the three names more than on the treatment itself. They chose one from each of three different dead romance writers.

“Shelley Ralston Havemeyer.”

“I may have spackled her living room,” Tyrone mumbles. “It was summer when I was in, uh, school. Till I stopped showing up.”