The Autograph Man

by Zadie Smith

  Alex took a minute to admire the gentle sun that kept its mildness even as it escaped a gray ceiling of cloud. On the horizon a spindly church steeple had been etched by a child over a skyline perfectly blue and flatly colored in. To the left of that sat the swollen cupola of a mosque, described with more skill. So people were off to see God, then, this morning. All of that was still happening. Alex smiled, weakly. He wished them well.

  IN HIS BATHROOM, Alex was almost defeated by the discovery of a sequence of small tragedies. There was an awful smell. Receptacles had been missed. Stuff was not where stuff should be. Stepping over stuff, ignoring stuff, stoic Alex turned to the vanity mirror. He yanked it towards him by its metal neck until its squares became diamonds, parallelograms, one steel line. He had aged, terribly. The catch in his face, the one that held things up, this had been released. But how long was it since he had been a boy? A few days? A year? A decade? And now this?

  He bared his teeth to the mirror. They were yellow. But on the plus side, they were there. He opened his Accidental eyes (Rubinfine’s term: halfway between Oriental and Occidental) wide as they would go and touched the tip of his nose to the cold glass. What was the damage? His eyes worked. Light didn’t hurt. Swallowing felt basic, uncomplicated. He was not shivering. He felt no crippling paranoia or muscular tremors. He seized his penis. He squeezed his cheeks. Present, correct. Everything was still where it appears in the textbooks. And it seemed unlikely that he would throw up, say, in the next four hours, something he had not been able to predict with any certainty for a long time. These were all wonderful, wonderful developments. Breathing heavily, Alex shaved off three days’ worth of growth (had it been three days?). Finishing up, he cut himself only twice and applied the sad twists of tissue.

  Teeth done, Alex remembered the wear-and-tear deposit he had paid his landlord and shuffled back to the bedroom. He needed a cloth, but the kitchen was another country. Instead he took a pillowcase, dipped it in a glass of water and began to scrub at the handprint on the wall. Maybe it looked like art? Maybe it had a certain presence? He stepped back and looked at it, at the grubby yellow outline. Then he scrubbed some more. It didn’t look like art. It looked like someone had died in the room. Alex sat down on the corner of his bed and pressed his thumbs to his eyes to stop two ready tears. A little gasp escaped him. And what’s remarkable, he thought, what’s really amazing, is this, is how tiny the actual thing was in the first place. This thing that almost destroyed me. Two, no, maybe three days ago he had placed a pill on his tongue, like a tiny communion wafer. He’d left it there for ten seconds, as recommended, before swallowing. He had never done anything like this before. Nothing could have prepared him! Moons rose, suns fell, for days, for nights, all without him noticing!

  Legal name: Microdot. Street name: Superstar. For a time it had made itself famous all through his body. And now it was over.

  2.

  Out in the hall, Alex met Grace. She was crouched on the second step, looking vengeful. Her tail in the air, her face messy with bird blood. Protruding from her mouth was the greater part of a wing. Alex saw that it was no sparrow, either, but a colorful, pinky-blue type of bird, the sort he might have got sentimental over, built a birdhouse for, with one of these miniature Welcome Home mats much loved by the widowed of Mountjoy. But he had come too late for all that. When pushed (she had not been fed), Grace became a garden terrorist and made no sentimental distinctions between species in the same genus. A squirrel was as good as a mouse to her, a parakeet equal to a pigeon. Picking her up, Alex forgave her, kissed her on her flat head, tugged her tail and slid her down the banister. In return, she painted a long streak of red, like a design feature, down the length of pine, punctuated by little hillocks of bird guts. And still he did not throw up. Ha! Alex was counting this as Personal Triumph of the Morning #3. The second was walking. The first was consciousness.

  3.

  “It sort of hurts, here,” said Alex to his milk operative, Marvin, who was on the doorstep. Marvin reached out his dark hand and up went his white cuff. Despite himself, Alex thought of Bill Robinson reaching out for the hand of Shirley Temple. It did seem a musical out here today on the chilly street. Bright, awesome.

  “Where?”

  “Kidney area.”

  Marvin felt the area. He had long fingers and he poked deep.

  “Careful . . .”

  “What am I looking for? A lump?”

  “You think it could create a lump?”

  Marvin shrugged. “Highly unlikely, bro. Not in such a short time, anyway—but it raaver depends what they put in it, you get me?”

  Alex pulled his pajama top back down and frowned. “I have no idea what they put in it, Marvin. It’s not like this stuff is regulated. There was no ingredients list. There was no consumer—”

  Marvin waved his hands in Alex’s face, dismissing him. He never did sarcasm. He possessed what Alex imagined to be the essential sincerity of urban black men with hard lives.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your head isn’t itchin’ in your skull or nothing?” he asked, stepping back, holding Alex speculatively by the chin. Alex felt depressed. It was clear that Marvin’s expertise outstripped his own. It is depressing, being out-experted so early in the morning.

  “Itching?”

  “Then you’re fine. It might have been strong, but it sounds pure. Sometimes they’ve got Floxine in it. Then your head itches in your skull for a bit after.”

  “Floxine?”

  “Do you want any yogurts, then? Bloody freezing out here,” said Marvin, turning in the direction of his milk truck and employing one hand as a visor against the winter sun. He bounced on the balls of his feet, stepping back, stepping forward. In his left hand, through those long, clever fingers, he passed his small notepad from the first finger to the last and back again like a playing card. Marvin was bored.

  “No, not really.”

  “Say again?” said Marvin, in a menacing tone.

  Marvin was three months into a government-sponsored job initiative. Before this he’d had a brief stint as a parking attendant. Before that, he had been a dealer of drugs. At present he was in addiction counseling, the language of which he sometimes spoke on his milk rounds. As soon as Marvin began his deliveries in Mountjoy, a huge leap in demand for expensive yogurts and milkshakes occurred, a growth that had an exact correlation to public fear of Marvin. Alex too, at first, had ordered a lot of individually wrapped cheese singlets, mousses, pressurized cream cans, etc. But now he wanted to redraw the boundaries of the relationship. Now he wanted them both, he and Marvin, to move towards new criteria.

  “I’m all right for yogurts, actually.”

  “Well, bully for you,” said Marvin sourly. He slipped his pad into the pouch at the front of his uniform. He reached forward once more and widened Alex’s eyes with his fingers. “What was this foolishness called, again?”

  “I think, a Superstar?”

  Marvin clapped his hands together, laughed, and shook his head in a move called—if Alex were asked to give it a name—The Dance of Scoff.

  “And you’re the intellectual.”

  “And I’m the intellectual.”

  “And so . . . what?” asked Marvin. “What was the deal, Tandem? Was joy sown before pain was reaped?”

  Alex fiddled with the fly of his pajama bottoms. From here his penis looked smaller than it had ever looked ever. It was curled in on itself like a mollusk—but where was the hard shell that would protect it? Where was its home? Its shield against life?

  “Were you . . . like, dancing or chilling or? I know some people,” considered Marvin, “and they get on a living-room trip. The TV sucks them in. They commune with the TV, right? And they take their trip through the channels. Suburban style-ee.”

  Alex had been in his bed for around three days, that much he had a grip on. In which time he had survived on the bright spangles of Christmas chocolate coins sitting on his night table. He remembered a lucid hour in which he had plumped
some pillows behind himself, picked up the phone and called a radio talk show during a conversation about early menopause. He remembered the sleep. Deep, padded. But the night before this, the night in question, this was a shut door with its wood warping from some unseen fire, smoke squeezing through. He could not open it. He didn’t dare.

  “Marvin,” he said finally, “I have no recollection. On the past week, I am drawing a . . .”

  Marvin nodded and made the sign for a big empty circle of nothing in the air. Through it Alex could see the embroidered lettering MARVIN KEPPS, MOUNTJOY MILK OPERATIVE and, beyond that, a tiny blanching gap in his buttons, where the tight corkscrew of his chest hair was suggesting something scary to Alex, some untapped velocity in the coil.

  “That will happen,” said Marvin, and placed his hands softly on Alex’s shoulders. “Tandem,” he said, “let me lay it out for you: in the pros column we have heightened sensory perception, visionary experience and the rest. I don’t have to tell you. Every note of music, every blade of grass, et cetera. But here on the cons we have short-term memory collapse. Back in the day, they called them Goldfish. For the reason stated above.”

  For the second time this morning, Alex felt tears rising. The specter of permanent neurological damage, number four on Alex’s Big Five List—

  1. Cancer

  2. AIDS

  3. Poisoned Water System/London Underground Gas Attack

  4. Permanent Neurological Damage (in youth, through misadventure)

  5. Degenerative Brain Disease, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Etc. (in old age)

  —grabbed at his gag reflex and he swerved towards a bush by the fence. Marvin caught him by the elbow, hugged him to his body and straightened him up.

  “None of that, please,” said Marvin fondly, massaging his knuckle into the top of Alex’s head. “It’s just the problem with those things, and what I’ve learnt is this: they’re meant to be a shortcut to the ultimate . . . thing, the plane, or whatever you want to say it like, yeah? It’s meant to be: here’s your thirty quid or whatever, take me to higher consciousness, please. And it don’t work that way, bro. You don’t get the full benefit. You’ve got to work your way up that tree, meaning that that is an allegory which is saying: you can’t just fly up to the branches. You get me?”

  “Right.”

  “I know I’m right. So, Mr. My Bed Is My Office. Going out today?”

  “Considering it, Marvin.”

  “Consider hard.”

  “Will do.”

  “Will do,” echoed Marvin in the effeminate voice he often used to impersonate Alex. In the past this has made Alex wonder whether he seems effeminate to black men or just to Marvin in particular. A couple of months ago, in Mountjoy Swimming Pool, Alex-Li Tandem did a passable backflip and then, rising out of the water, put the matter to his friend Adam, who took off his nasal clip and said:

  “No . . . no—I don’t see that, I don’t find you particularly effeminate. You’re too bulky, for one. And hairy. And he does that to me too, anyway. And I’m the black guy.”

  “Yes,” said Alex happily, kicking some water in the direction of children who had kicked some at him, “you’re the black guy.”

  “Yes, I’m the black guy. No doubt I die halfway through. So. I don’t know. I think it’s probably more of a class thing.”

  Water dribbled out of Adam’s nose along with some more viscous material. There should be a law. Alex took an Olympic breath and surged to the gritty, tiled bottom of the pool, performed a rolly-turn thing and kicked off from the side, after which he swam two thirds of the length underwater, a personal record. He was a little fat, these days, and he smoked. When he returned, he got four floats and put them underneath his body in such a way as to enable him to sit upright in the water and bob up and down in a sort of Mer-King scenario.

  “What do you mean, class thing? We’re not posh.”

  Here Adam paused to do some of his weird stretches. These made Alex feel that his friend came to the pool with a complex, beneficial, possibly spiritual, certainly undisclosed, exercise program in his mind, while Alex just spent the time pissing around (often literally), examining the incredible potential variance in the curvature of young women’s pubic bones. Adam hooked his ankle round the handrail. Near Alex a floating plaster flipped over to reveal a tiny circular concentration of blood. Again, thought Alex, there should be a law. Adam yawned, and seemed to take his arms, turn them backwards and force his hands to pray behind his back. His stretch was impressive and women looked. These days he was the opposite of fat and did not smoke, except for weed. His stomach was a taut drum of rippled jet. He said:

  “No, true, but we’re posher than Marvin. That’s the key fact. But it’s subtler than that, though, it’s like, the voice Marvin’s doing, that’s the same voice you do when you’re doing your Lenny Bruce goy voice—”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Well, brainiac, I’m saying that maybe, in relation to him and his ex–drug dealer, working-class soulfulness et cetera, we’re all goys.”

  “And he’s; the Jew?”

  “And he’s the Jew.”

  “That argument is uniquely . . .” said Alex, but couldn’t think of the word.

  “Yeah . . . but I sort of like it for that. You should put it in your book—justifies a whole new subsection.”

  After which Adam went alone to the diving tank, while Alex, treading water furiously, internally raged at a repulsive woman in fluorescent costume. Her head was hinged and awful on her fat neck. Her mouth was huge. She was laughing off her son’s fecal mishap in the shallow end. There should be law upon law, with commentary.

  IT WAS NOW that Marvin—who had turned his back on Alex to look towards the house opposite—made a sudden little yelp. He rolled back on his heels in the International Gesture for surprise. He thrust one arm out in the air. He looked like Chaplin.

  “Mate, isn’t that your car? Check it! Oh my gosh. Jesus Christ Almighty.”

  Two spaces down from where she was usually parked, Alex could see his vintage MG, Greta, hitched up on the curb quite desperately, trying to save herself. Her front bumper had been brutally torn from her body and now hung by an iron thread; her door had been punched by a giant. Her back window had been visited by a glass spider. So had the front.

  “And the passenger window!” shrieked Marvin, pointing to the passenger window. Greta’s side was scratched from toe to tail, and her canvas roof was sadly pleated and condensed, an exhausted accordion. The whole of the car, in fact, was shorter by half a foot.

  “Brer, did you do that?”

  Alex folded into the door frame like Lauren Bacall. It was only eight-thirty A.M., but already it was time to throw in the white towel. The day had looked good. The day had lied. He felt he could not fight days like this. He believed utterly that there are days in which it is revealed that someone has written a cruel story about you for their own entertainment. He believed, further, that on such days all you can do is follow, dumbly, with your knuckles grazing the ground. In that sense, if in no other, he was a profoundly religious man.

  “I can’t believe that, Dred! Look at dat!” said Marvin, grinning. Marvin was enjoying himself. Alex parted his hands, slowly, relinquishing whatever was left.

  “What do you want me to say, Marvin?”

  Marvin sniffed. “Don’t mistake me, I don’t really care, I’m only the milk operative. I was just wondering if you did or did not do that to your own car. Other than that . . .” Marvin grinned some more.

  Now Alex let Marvin’s face fall out of view, bent his legs and crouched on the doorstep. On its lip, on the doorstep’s concrete lip, he met a massive pulsing snail wearing its shell a long way down its back, as a sort of afterthought. Alex peeled it off and held it in the cup of his palm for a moment. Then he launched it towards the grass, but even with that action came the sad thought of more creative possibilities for both him and the snail: the polished dark country of Marvin’s shoe, the cool, fea
tureless Lapland of the window ledge, the barren Arizona of the path that leads down to the road and eventual death.

  “Look. Seriously. Are you depressed? I mean, generally?” asked Marvin with real curiosity.

  “Yes. Yes, I imagine so.”

  “You imagine so?”

  “Marvin, I don’t want to talk about this, actually.”

  “And you don’t know when did you do that to your car?”

  “Marvin, I have no recollection.”

  Marvin said “Ha!” like the first blast of a military horn. He took an elegant hop down two steps and moseyed down the path. The snail found itself somewhere maddeningly familiar, wet and green; a place where bad things, most often revolving blades, might arrive, with no warning, from nowhere. Alex crossed his eyes. Clicked his heels together three times. Closed his door against Mountjoy.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Yesod

  FOUNDATION • Famous Phrases #1 • Muhammad Ali was Jewish • Stress balls versus funnels • The covenant and the pound notes • Famous Phrases #2 • God and Garbo • Kitty Alexander’s autograph • Joseph explains the Judaic attitude to transubstantiation

  1.

  Back inside his flat, valiant Alex-Li held up a series of clothing items at arm’s length, and if he could not smell them he put them on. He took no great care, for the result was always the same, irrespective of effort. Everything he wore looked as if it had been flung at him by an irate girlfriend in a hallway, a ragbag of items he remembered wearing the night before, mixed with some he didn’t recognize.

  With one sock on, he hopped across the room, picked up the Autograph Association Flip Calendar on his desk and peered at it. February 12. Underneath, a photo of Sandra Dee. She was smiling and offering up two facts about herself: