Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

ON THE SIDEWALKoutside was a signboard displaying a shopper’s guide to downtown, and she scanned it for what she sought. The store, Ambit Books, was a few blocks farther along Front Street. It was a big, airy place — bigger, really, than demand appeared to necessitate. Most of the activity was in a coffee bar that took up about a quarter of the floor space, where two baristas served a half dozen customers; the hiss of the espresso machine and the rhythmic thunk of sodden coffee grounds being knocked out of the filter basket filled the store. The clerk up front was idle, arms folded across the top of her cash terminal. Kat found the fiction section toward the back, and there were paperback copies of Alexander Mulligan III’s three books: two novels, Fallen Sparks and A More Removed Ground, and a collection of short stories, The Proposition, the Tautology, and the Contradiction .

Kat enjoyed looking at books, the fussy business of jacket copy and blurbs, review quotes and author bios, acknowledgments and dedications. She sedulously examined all such matter on any book, even one she fully intended to read, before alighting on the text itself. These were new-looking editions, designed to complement one another, and she was slightly disappointed because the bio, with its serene list of the cumulative honors and accomplishments achieved over nearly fifteen years, was identical in each title. Mulligan lived in New York City with his family, where he was at work on a new novel: this intelligence was obsolete, apparently. None of the books included an author photo. Each acknowledged the help of the usual foundations, editors, agents, and other individuals providing aid and comfort. The short stories had appeared in magazines she had heard of and in obscure-sounding journals. The review quotations were typically hyperbolic. She flipped through the books, hoping to become duly excited, but she didn’t. It was not inviting stuff, in her opinion. She knew that she wasn’t quite sure how to be impressed by a book, specifically by fiction, and she’d long ago determined not to feel guilty over failing to respond to art for which claims had been made that weren’t supported by her experience of it, but it was disappointing anyway. It was because she’d met him and had found him engaging and interesting enough as a human being that she’d hoped that his books would be even more so.

In the end all it added up to was around twelve hundred pages, over fifteen years. In the end it really wasn’t very impressive, as achievements went, when you thought about it. In the end she took all three of the books up to the counter and bought them, the clerk scanning and bagging them without comment, although Kat wasn’t quite sure what she’d expected, a chat or an opinion or what: she didn’t actually enter the dismal swamp of an independently owned bookstore often enough to be familiar with the fringe benefits currently on offer for patronizing such a place, unless it was just a general feeling of virtuousness, like you got for contributing to your local public radio station. The girl just shoved the books in a plastic bag as if they were socks or pork chops and sent her on her way, corroding a little more the romance that survived, God only knew why, in Kat’s heart.

She stepped out onto the street. The sun was beginning to break through the clouds, a little, and she tried to stay in it as she headed back to her car. As unexciting as she found the books, she was oddly excited to possess them. She felt that somehow she had illicitly found out something about Alexander Mulligan, although she knew this was absurd: writers deliberately published these things, didn’t they? Still and all, she would have been reluctant, even embarrassed, to admit to him that she’d gone to buy his books after having lunch with him.

I SATon the sofa, a package of Wheat-Free Oatmeal Snackimals balanced in the palm of my hand. I’d unexpectedly encountered this latter-day hippie product at the vast, the cosmically sized, Meijer’s hypermarket where I go to hike the aisles in awe and, almost incidentally, to buy groceries. That had been the highlight of my day, apart from the moment that afternoon when I’d nearly run over some laptop-carrying kid racing out of Starbucks and into Front Street traffic.

The cookies were one of my children’s favorites, they reminded me of my children, I’d bought them as an aid to “thinking of” my children, but now I’d eaten every last one without sparing a single thought for them. Fuzzily, I gazed at the package (stoned-looking cartoon animals), then moved it to my mouth and emptied it of whatever was remaining at the bottom. Cookie fragments spilled out of the gas- and light-impermeable, shelf-stable, food-grade metalized plastic pouch and landed on my lap. Certified Organic crumbs and NASA-developed technology: the divergent dreams of the sixties, realized in unison. At last.

That was supper. It was Wednesday night, and I hadn’t felt like heating up, ordering in, or taking out. Animal crackers, scotch, and cigarettes that I’d bought with such hurried impulsiveness that I was lighting them with the only thing I could find, a gigantic butane fireplace lighter that spurted six-inch flames with an audible whoosh. Something had put me in one of those prolonged frail moods that call for voluptuous overindulgence. I listened to songs guaranteed to bring me to tears. Swayed to them, waiting for the tears: for false nostalgia, for absent friends, for lost youth, for my dead father, for my neglected children, for my demolished marriage, for my disastrous love affair. The tears came easily; I could cry to Miles Davis and the Beatles and the Clash with identical enthusiasm. I could cry to “Gymnopédie No. 1,” to the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fourteenth String Quartet, to Johnny Griffin playing “These Foolish Things,” to Elvis interrupting “Milkcow Blues Boogie” to entreat Scottie and Bill to get real, real gone for a change. Afloat on my couch in an ocean of tears, I wept equally for what had changed in the natural course of things and for what I’d intentionally exterminated. I wept until the scotch began to sour my stomach and the tears wouldn’t come anymore.

Later, after I’d stood in front of the refrigerator for several long, unsatisfying minutes (my pantomime there, framed in its light — bending at the waist, rising and placing my hands on my hips, tilting my head, sagging dejectedly at the shoulders — made me feel like one of those gigantic, forlorn, hyperexpressive marionettes), I turned on the TV. On one of the cable channels they were showing the movie made from my first novel. I knew the movie, but once again I was surprised by the casual, almost impertinent way that my characters had been translated so that they could be impersonated by movie stars, who never seemed more ornamentally otherworldly, more like they were merely walking through someone else’s dream, than when they uttered a line that had originated in my head.

But that happened only occasionally. There was a scrupulous thoroughness to the way that this complex collaborative effort worked to rebuke the book that had brought it into being. Space I’d filled with words was filled with pictures instead, and while I can’t say for certain whether my words were better than their pictures (I’d absorbed at least this much anxious relativism during my sojourn among the hipster elite), the film did exhibit a deliberate loss of density, as if a plate of spaghetti had been transformed into a mass of cotton candy. I felt my interest slipping away while watching (not for the first time), and as it did the book began to return to me, not as the familiar published object for whose permanent flaws I had long ago forgiven myself, but as the unsatisfyingly intimate companion that only a work-in-progress can be. Intractable, yet passive, permitting itself to be read and interpreted differently each time. Doesn’t pull its weight in the relationship. Doesn’t care how screwed up you think it is. Doesn’t care if you just quit, never add another word to it. Meanwhile, you fret over it constantly, hate leaving its side even when things aren’t going well; neglect other aspects of your life for it. In characterizing the relationship between writer and manuscript (here I lifted an index finger into the air from where I now lay on the floor beside the coffee table, wagging it dramatically), we see preoccupation on the writer’s part, involving low avoidance and high anxiety, and, on the manuscript’s part, dismissiveness, involving high avoidance and low anxiety. Very familiar. I raised myself on my elbows, gazed briefly at the TV screen (Ethan Hawke and Christina Ricci driving wordlessly along an empty road in a 1967 Chevelle — as usual I registered the car as a nice cinematic touch), took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it haphazardly somewhere along its length with the fireplace thing, and then recommenced my drunken lecture. Once the relationship ends, with either a finished or unfinished book, the writer regroups. Classic (finger shooting into the air once again, showering glowing coals and charred paper down on my face): ceases and desists with the book, suppresses anxiety, distances himself from the project.