Caleb Crain - Necessary Errors

“I’m trying to write about my friend, but I’ve been having some trouble,” Jacob admitted.

Kaspar’s face brightened at the opportunity to be of use.

“I think it’s because I’m angry at her.”

“It is about her,” Kaspar said, to be sure he understood.

“It’s fiction.”

“Of course, of course. And what is the nature of the trouble?”

Jacob hesitated and then said, “Maybe you could read what I have.”

“May I? Then let us have the tea, and perhaps to open the fishes and to have them with little breads as I read, yes? Do you say that in English, as the Czechs do?”

“No, but only because we don’t eat them. We have crackers.”

“That’s right. ‘Crackers.’”

Jacob put teabags into cups and a kettle of water on to boil and fetched the pages about Meredith from the bedroom. Kaspar fluttered them in his hands to get a sense of how many there were, and then took from a pocket somewhere beneath his sweaters a pair of glasses with silver frames. “If I am to think while I read, I must either smoke or eat,” he said, as Jacob began to cut slices from a loaf of caraway-seed bread. Jacob put the slices on one plate and then opened the tin of anchovies on another.

“A fork, I think,” Kaspar suggested.

Jacob hadn’t focused on the actual eating of the anchovies. He handed Kaspar a fork and watched him spear one of the tiny pink-and-silver filets out of the oil and uncurl it on a slice of bread. Since no harm came to Kaspar after swallowing, Jacob imitated him. The flavor was mostly salt and sourness. He had been afraid he would be able to feel the prickle of the fish’s bones as he chewed, but he couldn’t.

“It is good, že jo ,” Kaspar said.

“It is,” Jacob said, polite and unconvinced.

Kaspar began to read. Jacob took up last week’s newsmagazine, which Carl had bought for him, and stared at it in his lap, pretending that he was reading also. He guessed that Kaspar wouldn’t notice if he didn’t eat any more anchovies, and in fact Kaspar didn’t notice. The room fell silent, except for the rustle of pages and Kaspar’s slow chewing. When the kettle whistled, Jacob rose and poured the water and brought the cups to the table.

For camouflage, Jacob continued to run his eyes emptily over the columns of the magazine. That was the trouble, wasn’t it, he thought to himself — that he was angry with Meredith. It was interfering somehow. She had been murdered, and it was unfair to be angry at her. On the other hand, because she had done the murdering, he was right to be angry at her. She had taken away her recognition of him when she left. Was he trying to take it back? Maybe what interfered was guilt. Maybe telling her story was too much like stealing it from her. He was calling attention to himself by writing the story, after all, making himself out to be something he hadn’t in fact been. While she was alive, he hadn’t even been able to say he was in love with her. Then again there might be no moral factor at all; a part of him might just be trying to protect himself, to push Meredith and what he had shared with her away.…The longer he thought about it, the less able he was to tell the difference between what was his doing and what was, at least in his own mind, Meredith’s. It also became hard to tell the difference between what he wanted and what he was afraid of. It was a way of thinking that didn’t lend itself to storytelling. There was no knight to pick up the sword, no growling bear to slay, no princess who asked to be married. Everything was also its opposite; nothing was capable of change. Perhaps he didn’t want anything to change, as if by making reluctance into a principle, he could keep Meredith alive. In that case his story was like Henry’s, without his having intended it to be. In that case it was a story about not wanting to tell a story.…

Abruptly, in an interruption of his own thoughts, Jacob realized that in giving Kaspar the pages, he had forgotten all about the main character’s attempt to seduce another man.

He watched Kaspar nervously. After finishing the last page, Kaspar picked up the others, which he had set down one by one as he read, and tapped the sheaf on the table to align it.

“At the end, where the angry man makes a pass at the other one, I think I was thinking it was a symbol,” Jacob said. It was almost painful how badly Jacob wanted Kaspar to make sense of what he’d written. The schoolboy in him was impatient, too, to hear whether he had done well.

“May I?” Kaspar asked, with his pack of Petry in his fist. Jacob gave permission but didn’t take one himself. “And the trouble,” Kaspar continued, “you think, it is that you are angry, you say, like the angry man.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps, perhaps.” In automatic movements, Kaspar opened the double windows beside him a crack, and some of the bitter smoke from his cigarette flitted out. “A symbol…It is a symbol of what?”

“Of union,” Jacob said, but the answer sounded too grand. “Of wanting to know what the crying man is feeling.”

“But he doesn’t want that,” Kaspar said, with his crooked smile.

“Yes he does,” Jacob insisted. “The man who isn’t crying wants to know why he’s angry at the other man.”

“No, he wants to not-know,” Kaspar said. “The nature of what he wants is not-knowing.”

Jacob took a breath. “Because it’s two men?”

“Because such a union is the thing itself. It is not the symbol of it. It cannot be a symbol.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are no words for it.”

Again Jacob was suspicious. “No words for love between men?”

“No, no.” Kaspar seemed to brush away the misunderstanding. “For sex. There are no words.”

“You can write about sex.”

“But if you do, the words become the thing itself, again,” Kaspar explained. “It cannot be put into words.”

“You mean it turns into porn.”

“If you will.”

Jacob thought of the character he had tried to create, and of his own frustration, which he had tried to put into the character. “But he does want to know,” Jacob said, “and he doesn’t know.”

“But he will want also to not-know. To be alive in not-knowing. To be with his friend in not-knowing.”

“His friend?”

“The one in the ground.”

“But he wants to be with the man. That’s what he says. He doesn’t want to be with her.”

“He is in anguish. He is lying to himself.”

“What if he’s really gay?” Jacob asked.

“You have not written that story,” Kaspar calmly answered.

“But what if he’s really gay?” Jacob repeated.

“It will make no difference.” He blinked a few times, perhaps irritated by the smoke. “He is in two,” he continued. “That is what it means, to want another in order to have union. He is in two.”

“You mean he wants to be with him and with her.”

“No, no. He is in two in order to be with her.”

“Because he shouldn’t be with her? Because that’s not who he is?”

“No, no.” He stubbed out his cigarette abstractedly. “Listen,” he suggested, “perhaps it is not you who were in two. Or not only you. Do you see?” He looked out the window as if to leave Jacob the freedom to approach the idea. The sky was gray and near as if it might snow, but it had been gray yesterday as well, and it hadn’t snowed then. “She was two, and so you were two in being with her. And she killed one of them. One that was she killed the other that was she.”

“You didn’t know her.”

“No. This is true.”

“That’s also the fake part of the story,” Jacob said with some agitation. “About the other man. That’s the part I made up. I didn’t intend for it to seem real. It’s the part I added, that I was conscious of adding. I didn’t have a real person in mind. If anything, it’s a little forced. Do you know what I mean?”