David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

“Here, take a Margo! sweater, courtesy of Margo,” said Gray Skirt. “Margo keeps the studio at this temperature to boost alertness. It was one of many changes she made around here after she read your book.”

Was she fucking with him? Mark wondered. If not, then he was dealing with a real fawn, which was exciting. He scanned her again for any obvious defects that might have escaped his initial survey. Somewhere between black car and chill studio, she had swapped her extreme parka for a sort of power shawl, which was somewhat more revealing. She had pretty, coltish shoulders and thick black hair. But still. She might very well be fucking with him. There was a lack of feeling in the way she deferred to him, although that could have been due to the fact that she was Margo’s third — or maybe even second — lieutenant, and therefore more powerful and important than he was. If she was only chafing at the task assigned to her, that would be fine. He could probably win her over by acting as if he didn’t care that she outranked him. But he wished to eliminate the possibility that she was one of the — it must be many — people who believed that his book was totally fatuous. Did she know that he could not now recall how he had arrived at any of his so-called consciousclusions; had no idea, really, what the word was meant to mean? Ditto flowtachment. Did she know that, after he and his eight agency-supplied editors had been over the copy hundreds of times in the four weeks it took to produce the manuscript, Mark could not see in the book’s anodyne, aphoristic nonsense any of the ideas that had made “Motivation in an Unjust World” a good essay?

“Motivation in an Unjust World” was the essay Mark had written two years ago. The gist of it had been wrung from him in a single night, at his kitchen table, on an IBM Selectric, which hummed like a generator on a ship. Bombed on OxyContin and Pouilly-Fuissé chardonnay (and Riesling, when the chardonnay had gone), he had written ten pages without getting up. They were confused and chaotic, but there was a bright strand of logic running between the paragraphs, which drew a reader through the whole thing.

Or would, Mark felt sure the next morning, if he could just flatten out a few of the steeper arcs between ideas and find a way to avoid sounding so strident there at the end; in fact, do away with any whiff of strident and replace it with the detached tone he had somehow managed in the first third.

He set about the rewrite that day, after a cigarette and a walk around the block, and at the same kitchen table, stinging coffee and buttered toast in the a.m., slick Guinness and buttered toast in the p.m. By the next day he had ten thousand words on how a person — no, how Mark, how he himself should arrive at right decisions. Kant was in there. Elie Wiesel was in there, and Hannah Arendt and John Rawls. James Baldwin and Walker Percy were in there too. The trick was to stay hammered enough to write courageously but sober enough to see the screen and avoid porn. The trick was to write for an audience of one . I will not be rewarded for acting honorably, he stressed in the essay. Rewards come from without, and what is given to me is never really mine. Even my breath is borrowed.

The points he made were like lily pads on the surface of a lake — the monstrous lily pads he had seen once in a Florida swamp. You wouldn’t want to get too comfortable on those, but you could maybe alight on one briefly and move on to the next.

It was pretty basic stuff about how you’re never going to be certain, and there are too many variables to control for, and that probably the work of life is all about balancing, which is a task that never really gets any easier, so the most you can ever hope to do is be kind and be careful, and trying to be those things actually, literally, turns out to be its own reward. But he managed to hit just the right notes. Nothing had ever come to him like this before. Writing it, he felt the weight of self lessen and saw the gates of truth swing open. Even the scrape of the chair legs across the vinyl floor told him to keep writing.

Or was that the crushed-up Ritalin? The slush of ethyl alcohol in the alleys and boulevards of his brain? His roommate had left for the summer; his girlfriend had left him two months ago. The people he knew were getting married, getting better jobs, getting out of the kind of housing you find by pulling tabs off signs in laundromats. He had few friends at work, because work was a biotech company for which he wrote press releases and annual-report copy, and it was made up mainly of hyperintelligent Indians and hypergreedy non-Indians, very few of whom wanted to start drinking directly after work in the Plough and Stars as Mark wanted to do, desperately and daily. So he was alone in those days and had no one to check his slide into the fog and no one, as it happened, to read what he wrote. When he pulled up at the close of a particularly breathless paragraph (…because there are judges. Somewhere. In your particular heavens, in your beating heart. In the knife you drag across the toast, in the hands you lay on others. Judging and being judged at once, we cancel ourselves out, as in sleep, and in that hush is our salvation. At our best, we solve for x, and x = 0), it occurred to him that he might be writing nonsense. So he took a walk around the jagged June of Somerville, past the Virgin Marys in their half-buried-upright-bathtub shrines, past the old Portuguese ladies who, scarved and scowling, pushed squeaky carts around the neighborhood. Another cigarette and then a cup of coffee squirted from the machine in the Kwik-Mart on the corner. And, for later, a couple of Budweiser tall boys and an ice cream bar from the cases beside the coffee-squirting machine, and then he waited at the counter behind the old man who fat-fingered quarters from his swollen palm for two scratch tickets and a pack of Old Golds. And then he went home, climbed the two flights of sagging wooden stairs, and played a CD too loud for two p.m. as he lay on his sprung couch, in and out of a reverie.

No. It was real. This is real, he thought. At least as real as the deft illusions his loser magician father had taught him before fucking off, when Mark was twelve, to drink himself into a soggy death in Berlin. Real like those illusions in that the effect was real, so who cared about the method?

But Mark plagiarized at school, lied to girlfriends, dodged his mother’s phone calls, pretended to knowledge he didn’t have, kept for himself a BlackBerry he found in the break room at work, cheated deftly at cards, put recycling in the trash, didn’t really care about Africa or children, forgot birthdays, and stepped over the indigent in the street. He was vain and bigoted and selfish and put the maintenance of his drug habits before his personal relationships. So how could he have gotten his hands on a complete moral code? The habits and attitudes that he had somehow managed to pin in paragraphs like iridescent flies on black foam board — they were thin on the ground in his own life.

Maybe he was turning over a new leaf. Maybe the power to change was being delivered to him, or he was finding it in himself. So he pounded a Budweiser and devoured the ice cream bar and went at it again.

The problem, he was now certain, was that everyone — no, most people; no, he, Mark, was operating under the mistaken belief that there was an autonomous self sitting in a little driver’s seat behind his eyes. And that everyone was — no, he was, Mark was, forever overestimating his own importance, his own agency, his own centrality. Until I can live in the knowledge that the Self is more or less a happy accident, I will never be free. Let the reader decide if that was the problem in his or her own case. Speak only for yourself. But also: I am you and you are me. If you would prefer not to be me, tough. Those people who roll their suitcases faster or slower than you in airport concourses? They are not just extras; they are the thrilling protagonists of their own stories. Those dullards in NFL-branded jackets who jaw loudly into their idiot phones on the T? They are you. They who jabber about their dead kin on CNN? They are you too. U2 is you too …no, ex that out. Come back to earth. What was it he was trying to say? Was there any more alcohol around here?