Rivka Galchen - American Innovations - Stories

“Great, great,” I said, in a closing voice. “I’m, you know, all over that, totally.”

“Totally?”

I coughed, as if to locate the problem in my throat.

“So you’re OK?”

“Excited. I’ll be there.”

“Like even what’s just happened to you — that’s an idea right there.”

* * *

And it struck me that maybe the meeting was the kind of thing that was going to save me, or at least that I should not entirely neglect to prepare for it, since it might kind of sort of save me a little bit. It could be a very good thing. I could watch myself put forward my best effort and then feel good about myself for having done so, for having tried. The least I could do, for me — and for my progeny, too! — was open up a Word file. Or, failing that, jot down a few notes on a legal pad. Let me just say now, because I don’t believe in suspense — or at least I feel dirty when I try to engage in it, probably mostly because I’m no good at it — that I didn’t prepare for the meeting at all.

My friend David came by. He needed to borrow money. He had much worse luck in life than I did. Also expensive dental problems, and an addiction to acupuncture. I told him about the leaving and also about the blog.

He already knew about the blog. He, too, had found it by going through the browser history of Jonathan’s laptop. “The guy had a pretty fantastic imagination,” David said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it. I supposed we should respect that.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Remember the two months you didn’t speak to me after I’d said maybe you were rash to marry after three weeks?”

I had recently heard someone use the word “poleaxed.” That word made me think back to those years in Kentucky as a child; I don’t know why, that was the thought. I was a fancy citified woman now, and so my life could have properly sized disasters, ones in the comedy-of-manners way of things, rather than in the losing-a-limb-to-a-tractor-blade way of things; that was another thought. If there was no blood on the floor, then it wasn’t a tragedy. That was what “urban” meant. Could mean. Poleaxed. I had also once come across a phrase about a book “lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life.” It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest.

“We were still sleeping together,” I said. “People don’t sleep with people they hate.”

“Well, that’s not true,” David said.

David was an aspiring screenwriter and my most reliable friend. I didn’t tell him about my upcoming movie meeting. The mood of betrayal had gone general.

“Men like me,” I said, hand on the belly that housed a being of unknown gender. “They really do. Just yesterday a man stopped me on the sidewalk to ask me if I was Italian.”

“Who was talking about not liking you? You’re just in pain.”

“Maybe I’m not in pain.”

“I’d put my money on pain. It’s the Kantian sublime, what you’re experiencing. There’s your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known.”

Sublime. I thought of it as a flavor. Maybe related to key lime. I didn’t know what the Kantian sublime was. It’s important to be an attentive host. And wife, for that matter. I went to the kitchen and got out some crackers and mustard and jam; it was what I had. I found some little decorative plates to make it look nicer. Suddenly I was worried that David might leave, that I’d have no company left in the world.

“You know who I get fan letters from?” I said. “I do get fan letters. That’s something, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a certain distance from which I’m lovable. I get fan letters only from men. Only from men in prison.”

I set down the confused cracker offering.

“You really haven’t looked at the blog?” David let the crackers just sit there. “On the one hand, I want to congratulate you. But it might help you, to look.”

I spread mustard on a cracker.

“I used to get fan letters from prisoners, too,” David said. “Back when I ghostwrote that column for Hustler .”

“Are you competing with me?”

“I’m just sharing. This is intimacy, Trish.”

“One of the letters I got was about love. It was like seven pages long. Like a lengthy philosophical inquiry into the nature of love as written by a very smart fifteen-year-old. Not sex, but love. He specified that, like, maybe seven times. Maybe that means it was about sex. Anyhow. About love.”

“What you’re saying is somehow not becoming; you don’t sound like yourself.”

Life, I was deciding, was a series of stumblings into the Kantian sublime. Not that I knew one sublime from another, as I said, but I planned on asking David about that when I was feeling less vulnerable. “Well, this kid said he wanted to confirm with me some impressions about love that he had gotten from my book. He wanted to know if I’d been honest about what love was. He said he would one day get out of jail, and that it was important that I write back to him. He said I could take as long as I wanted to get back to him. ‘As long as you need,’ he said. ‘You must be busy, take a year, that’s fine.’”

“That’s gracious, that he gave you an extension at the university of him.”

“I thought it was sweet. I didn’t write back.”

“Did I tell you that the pilot thing is finally fully dead now?”

“Gosh.”

“Do you miss Jonathan?”

“I wanted to tell you,” I said, “about this other letter, too. I don’t know why this guy wrote to me in particular. He didn’t say. He was also a prisoner. He was very polite. He said simply that he had an idea for a movie, that it involved the Tunguska incident of 1908, and he wanted to know if it was a reasonable hypothesis that the explanation for the Tunguska incident could be antimatter—”

“I wonder if I would get a lot of work done if I was in prison—”

“I didn’t know what the Tunguska incident was. I had to look it up. Turns out there was this place in Siberia where for thousands of acres the trees were suddenly laid flat. No scientists really bothered to check it out for years and years. But there were reports of unbearably loud sounds, apocalyptic winds, strange blue lights. It must have looked and sounded like the end of the world. They think maybe it was a meteor. Some people saw a column of blue light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving north to east. Some said the light wasn’t moving, just hovering. Windows hundreds of miles away were broken.”

David was reading aloud to me from Jonathan’s blog as I went and got the printouts of witness accounts I had found on that horrible thing called the Web.

“See, it’s not even really you ,” he was saying.

“Shhh,” I said. “Listen.” I read out: “‘The split in the sky grew larger, and the entire northern side was covered with fire. At that moment I became so hot that I couldn’t bear it, as if my shirt were on fire, I wanted to tear off my shirt and toss it down, but then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown several yards—’”

“God, I would have loved to be there, that really was the sublime—”

“They say that for many nights afterward the sky over Asia and Europe was still bright enough to read the paper by.”

“Did you answer the letter?”

“I told him I couldn’t think of any reason why antimatter wasn’t a plausible explanation. Though who was I to answer that question? I wished him luck with his idea. I might even have signed the note ‘Love.’”

I lent David three hundred dollars, which seemed confirmation of my having taken advantage of him in some fashion.