In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

  “Gyklny, good to see you, my half-caste friend. Who’s this with you?”

  “Hello, Mr. Cepecauer. We were just discussing the ‘Death, Dying and Age’ course you’re teaching next semester. My friend here is of two minds about enrolling.”

  Cornelia imagined what Gyk’s mouth attempting to devour itself would look like.

  “She’s real keen on the subject matter,” Gyk continued. “But wants to know what your writing’s like. It’s been a challenge just to put into words.”

  Cepecauer, whose skin was already of such an unnatural pallor that one had only to guess where the blood had drained to, appeared here to become agitated with the recognition conferred upon him. His fingers made odd contortions, recalling strands of a shag carpet weighed down with dampness. When the twisting fit had passed, the author had curved his lips like a pair of sweeping legs and combed his fingers through his grimy hair, as if such movements were acknowledged signs of thoughtfulness—such were the images Cornelia had tabulated to memory before he made his dramatic pronouncements on the life cycle of mankind as it related to a meaningless existence.

  “It’ll all depend on what you want out of this course, Miss…” he began, hoping to be introduced formally. “Whether or not the value that I have to offer is of any use for your purposes. Have you read my work? No? It’d be a good idea if you did, particularly my last two books—the strongest of the lot. They’re good, great, some are even accustomed to say. I think you’ll enjoy them, provided you don’t misunderstand them—their intention that is. You’ll get a feeling of what it is I’m trying to do in this course, what I’m trying to get the young to rub up against. Zatylny here realizes, er, has realized that, haven’t you?”

  “On the whole of it you could say as m—”

  “Yes, I really think that you’d stand to gain quite a bit. Quite a lot, by rights. You know, perhaps I can speak to something that may be of interest to you. Have you ever considered where the impulse to write comes from? Yes, a young South Asian authoress like yourself surely has. Well, I hope you’re not too flummoxed when I tell you that I in nowise can begin to discover why! Ho ho, not what you were quite expecting, I’ll wager. But I’ll have you know, the mark of a prime artist, the real capital thinker, like—is absolute ignorance in the face of inspiration’s ultimate cause. The more forthright the avowal, the more towering a force. I know no more as to the nature of this native compulsion than of the revolutions of the earth. It isn’t the writer’s domain to discover his own motivations, and it certainly isn’t for others when he heaves over the horizon. I tell my young authorlings not to brook any attempts at such a thing. It’s dreadful and uncalled for. You cannot exist as both the bloody mirror and the mirrored; you can communicate with each other, and establish symmetries of passion, but you cannot be in two places at once, now can you? Simple, fundamental physics—the ‘science of nature,’ that. And I hope to expedite neither your understanding and most certainly not your fascination in both of these ludicrous objectives, so you should not expect as much from my class.”

  Cepecauer’s handle on the authorial purpose appeared superficially justified, much like the elbow-patched sports jacket he’d finally found reason enough to drape around his lowered shoulders, now that he was in good moral standing to be in the company of men and women half his age. His movements were a graceless performance; he never seemed to look anyone in the eye, but instead seemed to be concentrating on some distant and probably unidentified vanishing point located directly above one’s hairline. He had finished droning nineteen to the dozen and hitching his pants around his bulging paunch, whereupon he finally bent his eyes at Cornelia, as if awaiting an answer to an unvoiced query.

  “Wh… what books will we be reading, Mr. Cepecauer?” Cornelia stammered. “Can I ask what aspect of death we’ll be touching on?”

  “I won’t be… I won’t be the one directing the attention of the class toward those particulars. It’s a very organic composition—the students that is. That will be your responsibility, assuming you enrol. I’m interested to know what facets of dying are of most interest to you. We’ll be exploring these subjects primarily through your writing. Workshops, lots and lots of workshops for the journeymen… women. They’ll be neither watch nor ward for bad writing in my course, dearie. As for books, should we use any at all, I’m undecided for the moment. Some of the greats will be accounted for too, perhaps. It would make sense, however, to include some of the forthcoming books from my new imprint at Dowley—advanced reader copies anyway. We’re thinking of calling it Oratorian—books meant to be read aloud, cover to cover. We’ve really got some dynamic voices in the offing. Not a European man in the lot. I’m merely editing it, you see. It’s going to do a lot for these writers, going to ruffle all the feathers that need ruffling. We’ll be a beacon to light the future, put some of these decrepit gaffers in their place. I’ll let Mr. Gyklny here fill in the gaps, though. I can’t tarry too long I’m afraid, run off my feet. And some manuscripts…”

  He trailed off at that point and then was gone, something setting him off in the direction of the north quadrant where the university’s wavering boundary appeared to trade furtive architectural insults against tumbledown restaurants and Hammer Horror grocers’ shops. Cornelia had often considered how in such an imagined confrontation the university would prove unwilling to utter any of its imprecations to the array of businesses along the opposite end of Main Street openly; it instead dispatched such stratally ambiguous individuals like Cepecauer to deliver its rumbling salvos in the form of his refusals to leave those establishments or his penchant for exclusively reading campus periodicals while patronizing them. Who exactly was leading such a war of rearranged personnel remained unclear: a renewed stream of students found steady employment along this strip annually, while the university never succeeded in dispatching Cepecauer with finality, making a calculation of gains and losses impossible to determine.

  These recollections now informed the agency of Cornelia’s feet. The young student discovered her drifting had become a semi-plotted course for the Brisket House—the deli Cepecauer frequented—a destination for which she cursed her stomach as well as her head. She hesitated at the door, knowing her instructor was accustomed to capping his lectures with Cobb Clubs and burnt coffee. Perhaps some revered master of the craft had done the same and he believed the transference of professional ability effected by a digestive medium? The post office was just a few metres away, and Cornelia thought it better to avoid the deli so close to her class finishing.

  Her weekly visits to the post had begun six months ago when she was unceremoniously rubbed out of a low-paying position at a publishing house where she weeded through manuscripts. Things had come to a pretty pass when a senior editor named Edgar Nishimura managed to stop cheques from being mailed out, inventing “vacationing bookkeepers” and giving false assurances of their arrival to palliate his employees’ tactical prodding. The situation deteriorated to such a degree that Cornelia found herself penning impassioned letters to members of parliament in the hopes that they would be scandalized to hear of the practices of skint businessmen; that her efforts curtailed all progress on her own novel did not trouble her, such was the intensity of her outrage. When Cornelia was turned out on her ear for her manoeuvrings, she remained undaunted to the prospect of getting even, having devised a scheme that needed comparatively little effort—all it required was some “light treading on the boards,” in a manner of speaking.

  Upon entering the post office, Cornelia approached a side-table and extracted some stationery she carried in her messenger bag. She rifled through the six letters packed away that morning and paused to decide which note would unsettle Nishimura more. Each letter contained a continuation of some dilemma more distressing than the last, broken off into instalments and written under various aliases, soliciting in some miraculous way a devoted correspondence. Cornelia considered whether the dying lost half-brother bidding a tearful farewell or the feted autho
r with allegations of stolen material would cause more harm. Recalling the encouraging response toward a brotherly meeting and the obliging assurances of sorting out any legal entanglements caused by oversight, the plucky writer posted both missives and began to rush out the door, as if loitering at the scene of the crimes, such as they were fast becoming, would prove imprudent.

  Just then, wearing a vermilion jumper and carrying a large envelope between his blotchy fingers that evidently contained a manuscript, Cepecauer entered the office and announced himself to the occupants by clearing his throat obnoxiously. Cornelia stood stock still and tried her best to conceal her appearance. In doing so, she forgot the four remaining letters held snugly between her hands.

  “Hello again, Cornelia. I can tell that you’re going to kick yourself later for not asking, so I’ll get it out of the… It’s my new book—managed in between lectures and office hours if you can believe it. Something called a roman à clef I was told expofactus. Not entirely harebrained if the application is in earnest, what? Possibly an Oratorian book, possibly not. Would that be unethical, I wonder? That’s exactly the sort of thing that I’m lacking—a kind of internal barometer for moral transgression. Would come in handy, that. My very own Zhang Chongren, an Alene Lee by my side. We could call it an ethics officer. But what would the salary for something like that entail, I wonder?” Cepecauer nudged a finger into his ear, foiling the blockage that irritated him, but without bothering for once to inspect its contents. He instead directed it to Cornelia’s four remaining envelopes. “Well, there’s coincidence for you. How do you know Edgar? I’m mailing him myself.”

  Cornelia’s eyes widened behind swollen hoops of light, a trick of her glasses’ positioning beneath the ceiling track bulbs which she hoped concealed her start from the recognition. The envelopes in her hands were facing him. She’d readied stories to offer in the event of being cornered in the post office, but none of these paranoid contingencies accounted for her interlocutor knowing her ex-employer first-hand. “Our Edgar? E… Ed and I go back a ways.”

  “So I gather. But how do you know him?”

  “P… print. Print industry. Mainly.”

  “Yes, buggerlugs works for Dowley & Hamm. Has for ages.” Cepecauer refused to budge, waiting for an answer even if it meant a noncommittal one. The thought of genuflection sickened her, but avoiding an honest reply helped brace herself for what followed.

  “That’s your new novel, you said?” she asked. “You’ll be sending it off to Edgar I assume?”

  “Ah, no. Not directly. His strengths don’t exactly lie in reading, but one must pay respects to the gatekeeper and his portcullis.”

  The confessionary nature of the admission caught her off-balance, but emboldened her for the remainder of the dialogue. “He has his days,” Cornelia offered. “He surprises even the most cynical of selves.”

  Cepecauer scrutinized her face; apparently satisfied, he continued his line of gibing, even past the point of carelessness. “Look, there’s no point in being charitable to lost causes. Edgar’s place is in managing other editors. He’s a pencil-pusher who cavilled his way to the top. But if you ask me the last time he read a book, let alone took an interest in one, I’d say I’d rather my afternoon go unspoiled. Five hundred?”

  “Five hundred what?”

  “Dollars. For the ethics officer. You’ve got those in spades. You keep me in check in the classroom, don’t you know?”

  “I’m not sure. Edgar had something akin to an ethics officer, but the duties as I understood them were largely ceremonial. That might not be the right word for it. They primarily did other things, and didn’t hold the title as you put it.”

  “Think it over. The position, I mean. We can discuss remuneration at another time. Are you working on anything? I don’t think we have a writer from the Orient yet. For Oratonian—it’s on my list. We have a map with pins in it at the office. Something to consider, if you have anything you want to send my way.”

  “I may have something.”

  “Are you keeping well in my class? Are you getting what you bargained out of it?”

  “I suppose I won’t have an answer for you until we’ve actually submitted assignments. It’s a real twister, the one you’ve assigned.”

  Cepecauer removed a sleek black briar from his breast pocket, but realizing his situation, thought better of it. He extinguished the match against his finger and winced. It was enough that Cornelia had witnessed the token of refinement. He’d come up hard, this one, obviously; hard enough to know which blamed pipe would get people looking at you in a certain way.

  “You’ve encouraged recommendations from us,” Cornelia continued. “So I thought it would be within order if I suggested something. Would it be worthwhile if you wrote the assignment with us? I know it’s unorthodox, but I think that with you leading the pack, as it were, we’d all gain a better understanding of some of those ‘cultivations of humanity’ you endearingly make mention of. That way we could see where we’ve been going wrong.”

  “Culti… so you have been listening! Yes, that sounds arrangeable. But the others, some of the dimmer ones, I’m not so sure they’d be as receptive, that they’d approve. They may talk, begin to think that I’m involved… involving myself too much.”

  “Oh no. No, no, no, Mr. Cepecauer. I’ve spoken with the class and they’re very keen on the idea. It was all a matter of who would get to you first to broach the subject.” Her palms began to perspire at the lie, thinking on what the worst possible outcomes would be, not if but when Cepecauer found out she’d led him by the nose.

  “It’s the perfect timing for it, actually. I’ve just gotten this load off my shoulders, and it would be the clinch as to what I’m to do next. Everything turned to good use. The past six months have been such a bitter run of corrections and excisions that some actual writing would be a tall order, though a welcomed one. You know, I think I will commit to it. Give you something I wish I’d had when I was wet behind the ears.”

  Cornelia hardly believed she’d earwigged the clod into believing her—her disbelief was enough to tune out the rest of the Slump’s conversation, as she had christened him to no one but herself. It would be worth more than a laugh—something to add to his locomotion of ridiculous philosophies. Only now there would be confirmation of his benign stupidity, an article of correction to apply against his chuntering, mind-clubbing fuzziness.

  “That’s wonderful!” she interrupted without giving thought to what he was saying. “Very sportsmanlike of you. And maybe it’ll be of use to you, writing on a subject that seems to have captivated your imagination for so long.” A stab in the dark, having still abstained from looking at his work.

  “Yes, you’re right on that count. Never a wasted opportunity to play the sophisticate. You know, my agent told me that was the way to go, yammering away on the same subject but from various angles for years and years. Improve my standing.”

  This avowal of hackery, seemingly free of ironical touches of any kind, demonstrated that Cepecauer believed honesty in the face of any delusion, no matter how horrifying a quality at which to be admitted, was the sort of achievement that would celebrate his name. He would, so to speak, rather continue wading through a pool of quicksand, admitting in the process that he’d neglected to guard against a concealed depression lying ahead, than avoid the deathly entrapment altogether by bothering to look where one foot settled after the other. Such was the rationale of the cretin, doing more for the safekeeping of his mental constitution than the prospect of a safe rescue. His problem, she initially thought, had lain in the inherited understandings and rootless experience that was generally traded among sciolists to stave off extinction; Cornelia had chalked up his thoughts on writing to an outmoded perspective. She now realized the terrible error. The man was legitimately blocked, no two, three ways about it.

  After their conversation ended, Cornelia lamely took leave of Cepecauer and returned to her home to start her assignment. It proved her fi
rst legitimate attempt at composition since leaving Dowley & Hamm that wasn’t motivated chiefly by vengeance, and even then, most of the assignment’s contents were appropriated from Nishimura’s own unbosomed emotionality that Cornelia’s petitions had successfully aroused.

  The first class after the weekend proved a surprising one for Cornelia’s classmates who were welcomed with copies of Cepecauer’s abbreviated meditations on love and death. The students did not usually speak to one another, preferring a coded system of glances to indicate bewilderment instead. Today proved an exception and solicited a few titters in the class, concealed only by the buzzing within Cepecauer’s throat which indicated boobish satisfaction. Cornelia took her place among the other classmates, fetching her assignment from a file folder. Aware that the time had finally come to confront the fear that, as an accomplished writer of some modest renown, Cepecauer’s writing might actually appeal to her, she looked to the neatly arranged document before her with now only a minimal amount of dread.

  It doesn’t pay to get mixed up with your pupils. No.

  A flash of relief swept over her.

  It doesn’t.

  Her eyes, inured by Nishimura’s training to evaluate its style and embellishments, for once sped along the pages to assess the basic components of the plot.

  It doesn’t pay, those feelings of vernal exhilaration, in the heartland of dynamic emotional upheavals, the weight you finally manage to keep off (all that Dinintel), the arousal of smooth, smacking flesh and lapped stomachs congregating in the grip of a Brandy Alexander hangover. Why me? (Why not me?) I ask myself over and over and over and over and over as I count the seconds before I climax. Life, ever mysterious, remains even more mysterious for the uninitiated foreigner. She is forty years my junior and I just don’t seem to care. Did I ever?

  The short story concerned a young woman enrolled in an MFA program with a prominent writer who initiated a flirtation that quickly evolved into a forbidden love affair, seduced no less by the author’s “creative fearlessness.” The piece went to great pains to extol the virtues of the student’s body and rail against the university’s unfashionable views on such relationships, which the narrator attributed to some sort of undiagnosed complex preoccupied with sexual meddling. The student bore a vague resemblance to Cornelia, but could very well have been mistaken for any of the other women in the classroom at the moment. She regarded her assignment with fortitude, which despite reservations about its title and execution, comforted her. Her piece bore no resemblance to the monstrosity Cepecauer had managed to give voice, flesh and form.