Christopher Sorrentino - The Fugitives

SOMETIMES I WONDERif it’s primarily envy that draws me to Salteau. It seems, not easy, but natural, what he has; a tap drawing from deep in the lizard brain. He speaks and the encrustations upon the world fall away as he brings a more essential one into being. It’s like watching the glass from which you are about to drink being blown, annealed, cooled; emerging brimming and beaded with sweat in some suggestive yet wholly new shape. I used to ascribe the same natural facility to painters and musicians, until I got to know some of them and realized that like me they’d been blessed with the dubious and vindictive gift of making it look easy. Going through an old manuscript one day I came across a (typical) page that looked like a knife fight had happened on it. Scissored passages, blood-red interlinear and marginal notes and corrections, a whole paragraph eliminated with slashing violence, six different page numbers in the upper right corner. In the finished book it nestled perfectly in context; read like a series of offhand remarks I’d thrown away with my feet up on the coffee table, a drink in my hand. Who would see the struggle? Who could? Some scholar-fanatic, a fawning hagiographer, an archivist accustomed to assessing things solely in terms of linear feet? Who could recognize that the provisional success had only meant moving on to the next failure? But Salteau never fails. Never hesitates. Never stammers when called upon to improvise, or to respond to the budding hecklers in his audiences. Salteau’s powers of invention, working within the constraints of polished legend, are constant.

Think of the story as a basic unit. Stand at the counter in the kitchen in the morning, shoveling in yogurt and bran, the old story of trying to live forever, why do you eat bran, well, I want to live. That’s one story. Or you say, dropping the spoon into the bowl to finger your jawline, I cut myself shaving, and the Mrs. says, with, I’ll grant you, an extraordinary level of awareness, wasn’t that a new blade? And the story wends its way through all the satisfying twists and false conclusions: the way it used to be, how I learned to shave, the corporate misfeasance of Gillette, ending Zen-like on the decision to grow a beard. This is how everyone lives; the traffic and lines, the rude clerks and precocious children, the price hikes and small happy surprises; times without number, continuous, and one day we look down to see our hands doing whatever it is they happen to be doing — chopping vegetables, typing, jerking off — and we finally recognize the truncation in that perpetual view, the necessity of a mind’s eye in order to see all of ourselves at all; we realize that we have been stuck staring at those hands for as long as our lives, our selves accruing and forming from the imperceptible blending of each moment into the indistinguishable modules of a whole, the unending stream narrated entirely by a hero without a face; those hands the only unvarying things, from delivery room to deathbed, to mark the fact that what we witness is ours and not someone else’s. How can we live if we don’t make discrete chunks of that continuum? This basic unit, the proffered parcel of our days and nights alone: anecdote and memory; association and reminiscence; conjecture, desire, and regret; the bones of the lunchtime saga over a glass of wine.

M ONDAYafternoon at four o’clock it began to snow. It was still snowing at midnight when I turned off the TV and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. It was snowing when I opened my eyes at seven thirty and went into the bathroom, the tile icy underfoot, to shower. Outside, the ragged sound of a snowplow scraping a path down the center of the street came through loud and clear. I listened to Interlochen Public Radio while I made coffee and the snow came down. Thick, abundant, lake effect snow, deep drifts wind-sculpted, joining with the mounded shapes of buried cars, mailboxes, fire hydrants, picket fences, to form spectacularly suggestive feats of architecture, Gehry igloos. I began to consider the task of dressing. It wasn’t especially cold, I had boots and a down parka, but the storm seemed to call for ceremony. The muffled streets were deserted, the only sign of humankind the fresh channel that the plow had scored in the roadway snow. I was excited about walking. Last-man-on-earth stuff, a fantasy since I was a kid. How would I survive while managing to retain every modern convenience? was the question, then as now. I imagined generators, water tanks with raincatchers, automatic weapons.

A vehicle was out of the question. I have a new truck, a Japanese make that’s regarded with faint suspicion by my more elderly neighbors — native Michiganders, after all — although the younger residents have plenty of German sedans and Swedish station wagons among them, an armada of rebuke against the retirees up from Kalamazoo and Ypsilanti, Flint and Hamtramck. Whatever its sins against nativism, my buried truck was out, both as a matter of practicality and in spirit. I’d have a walk-in freezer. A pantry the size of a restaurant’s. A Kalashnikov (what would the Boyds say?). I dressed decorously: long underwear, woolen socks, BDU pants, a T-shirt, a turtleneck, a fleece pullover. My boots, glistening with synthetic mink oil, gloves, a cashmere watch cap, and over everything my down parka with its faux-fur-trimmed hood, “designed to withstand elements mirroring those found at the South Pole,” in the words of the absurdly thick User’s Manual that had come with it. As I fondled the coat admiringly, even affectionately, I found myself standing in the doorway of the rear bedroom I use as a study, gazing with annoyance at my desk my chair my printer my computer. All calling to me with nothing to say: story of my life. Saying something was always up to me. I had answered the call unfailingly since I was twenty-five years old; followed every line to its conclusion. There may have been people waiting — so Dylan told me, so Monte told me — but it wasn’t their call that I’d responded to, ever. Last man on earth: would he still write novels? was the question. I wondered if it was a kind of knowledge I was acquiring, this ability to ignore the call. Or maybe it was just Susannah I’d acquired.

TUESDAYS AND THURSDAYS.Eleven a.m. I set out through the snow in my polar-survivor outfit. SUVs and pickups trundled by occasionally. Down Locust Street I heard the whine of a snowblower, saw a man astride it, meticulously reinscribing the shape of the sidewalk before a house, not one superfluous inch cleared on either side: his neighbors were on their own. The man had a fixed look of concentration, as if he had spent his life either operating machinery or dreaming of operating machinery. My kids wear that look when they’re deep in the landscape of invented games. The goal is total immersion. A world is at stake. And what look does a novelist wear when writing?

I trudged along, my boots disappearing into snow that was up to my knees. I kept my arms raised a little, held out at my sides, for balance; lifted my feet from the holes they’d just made and put them down again, making new holes, each step a complicated procedure. I worried, pleasurably, about nothing but the next step. The act of walking in the deep snow became the purest thing in life. If I chose I could turn around and see all the steps I’d taken, the accumulation of holes, a line of them stretching back to my porch, and they’d add up to nothing if I didn’t take the next step successfully. I knew that there was an objective at the end, but it was each tricky individual step that needed to be attended to, and that was what pleased me. Don’t fall. Don’t lose a shoe. But near the next corner I misjudged the invisible border separating the sidewalk from the road, tripped, and crumpled, harmlessly, onto my side. The event seemed to take place in slow motion, and when it was over I lay there, on the deserted street, warm and comfortable except for a vague creeping sense of ridiculousness, lying there in the gutter like a drunk. I got up then and brushed the snow off my clothes, looking at the small white crater I’d made. I felt myself beginning to think again.