Adverbs

by Daniel Handler

  “Come on, Joe,” Mike said, and Joe reached out and closed his hand around something sweet.

  symbolically

  After the catastrophe I moved out of the city to the California hinterlands to finish my novel, where I had an “unimpeded view,” their words. “Hinterlands” is my word. These are all my words, actually.

  As you know because you’ve read my novel, things were pretty sinister for a while. Several famous buildings had been blown up by angry people from another country with varying degrees of success. Sometimes many people had been killed. Sometimes not so many, and also there were rumors of a volcano underneath us. We were maybe living on a volcano, and the big question was what’s the next thing, when will the next famous building go, what will happen next. My unimpeded view was a famous building in San Francisco which it seems particularly pointless to identify any further. That’s why it wasn’t really the hinterlands, where they let me stay, it was just across a bridge from San Francisco and you could see quite a lot of the city, unimpededly, from the empty and grassy field all scrawled out in front of the cabin, including the famous building, but when you have been born in San Francisco and that’s where you drink your Campari, that’s where you buy your Stephen Spender, that’s where you walk with friends and hear about their endless problems, taking secret notes all the while for a novel, then anyplace outside of San Francisco is the hinterlands. It’s a real self-centered place, San Francisco, and that’s why I had to head out to the hinterlands for a while to get my words together and down on paper.

  In the novel you will recognize them as Lucinda and George, but the people who lent me the house were Nora and George, friends of my mother’s who have always been great supporters of mine. The place was empty because Nora had decided to travel for a while, and offered me the house because George had been killed in the big fire. The memorial made me sad. So many people were killed that we had to face that George was unimportant, just an incidental and never a target. At the gathering afterwards at the house I sat in the chair where later I would sit and begin my novel of our times, and read to the quieter members of the assembled mourners a poem about George that marked my return to rhyme.

  It is from that chair that I saw the unimpeded view of a man with something on a tripod, standing in silhouette at the edge of Nora and George’s field. I had just decided to call it a day on the novel and had poured myself some of Nora and George’s cabernet, which I was steadily working through, when I saw him, distant and rumpled, fiddling with a tripod and blocking my eyesight. I took the wineglass out with me and crossed to him in the field. I wasn’t scared that he was a terrorist, although I knew of course that I would be an obvious target.

  A part of my novel discusses how things can get clearer if you get closer to them, a sort of allegorical thing, and that’s how it was. Halfway across the field I could see a man a bit older than me, the thing on a tripod a video camera, and that he was rumpled in jeans and a linen shirt which he was wearing unbuttoned over nothing. He was a man with a baseball cap on his head, and also unshaven, but those seemed like things I could fix.

  “Hey,” he called over. “Am I on your land, man?”

  “Yes,” I called back. “What are you doing on my land?”

  He scratched his chin and shielded his eyes so he could get a better look at me. “Sorry,” he said. “I guess this isn’t a good time to run around with a tripod on private property.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess not.” I stood in front of him and took a sip of my wine to show that it hadn’t occurred to me to be frightened. “But what are you doing?”

  “There’s been a threat,” he said, pointing out across the bay to the building. “That’s the latest threat. That’s what they think is next, and there’s an opportunity here.”

  I took another sip and looked him over again. I had been at Nora and George’s for just a bit more than an empty week. Crossing the field to see him, sipping wine as I went, made me a gentleman farmer, discovering another gentleman on my property. “I see,” I said. “I think. You’re making a movie—?”

  The guy grinned at me. “Footage,” he said. “Footage. Don’t you watch TV? That’s where it said the threat would be. I’m surprised there’s not more people out here for pictures, but if I’m the only guy there’s all the more for me, right? If they say the building’s going to blow, people are going to want to know what it looks like. That’s footage. Every station in the world will want it. All the big networks, everything. Everybody.”

  “You’re here to tape it?” I asked. “If the building blows?”

  The guy shrugged, took off his hat, put it on, pointed at where the building was standing unharmed. “The way I see it is, like, the first time, what did people say to you? Turn on the TV, right? Something’s happened, turn on the TV. Somebody’s got to take the pictures of the things that are happening. It might sound greedy or something, but if I could stop it of course I would. If I could. But what I can do is, if it happens, I will have the pictures and so people can see and unite, or whatever. Be upset. Know what’s going on, because I sold the footage.”

  “Sold?”

  “Well, yeah.” He grinned again, and moved one arm so his shirt opened a little more. “I mean, I’m standing out here all day, right? That’s worth money. I can’t do it for nothing.”

  “You’re going to stand out here all day?” I said.

  “If you’re mad about the land,” the guy said, “I can rent it or whatever. You can have a piece of it. You can have some of the money. You can’t be some billionaire, living way out here in an old house like that. I saw when I drove up. Right? Right? You’ll take money. Money, money, money, money, money—there’s nothing wrong with it.”

  I took another gentleman sip and looked out at the city I had left, all the characters in my book, so busy and oblivious that they had never done anything for me, not a thing. “How much money?” I said.

  “They say thousands,” he said. “That’s worth it to me, to sit in a field. It’s a nice day, even if nothing happens. Right? Look, it’s okay, to be on your land, right? Hang out for a bit, if something happens you’ll see it, plus some money on the back end, right?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I was going to blow off work anyway.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said, and then began to fiddle with his camera again. I sat down on the grass and felt it scraggly around my shorts.

  “Do you want some wine?” I said.

  He squinted out at the horizon and then made a little frame with his fingers like movie people do in the movies. “It’s a little early for me,” he said, with the building in his sights. “What, eleven A. M.? No thanks. So what’s your name?”

  I looked out at the unimpeded city. From the edge of the field I could see places I had been a hundred times, distant and shiny like the setting of something. All ready to go. He and I regarded the city like a lover asleep when you’re not, him filming and me taking mental notes for work that was going to blow everybody away. “My name is Mike,” I said. “I’m a writer. I primarily write fiction.”

  The guy was looking through the camera but he nodded, making one last adjustment. “Well, Mike,” he said, “have you ever had sex with a man?”

  I thought I did a pretty good job of it. We walked back across the field and I didn’t do anything like take his hand, and when we reached Nora and George’s bedroom I stood in the doorway and bit my lip sort of, like I was nervous and didn’t know what I was getting myself into which I’ve found generally works to my advantage. Adam smiled at me and sat on the edge of the bed and took off my shirt very gently as I stood in front of him, things like that. It makes the sex better. This is the thing when love starts, both people pretending something that will make it happen, the lies all luscious and wet with lonely hope. Afterward he held me which if you have not shaven I do not like and which is easy to get out of if you have set it up previously that you’ve never had sex with a man so now you’re freaking out a little bit an
d don’t want to be held. “Sorry,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. Outside it was still plenty sunny and I had to shield my eyes as I scurried out of bed and put my shorts back on, looking at him and leaning against Nora and George’s bookshelves. Thick nonfiction poked me in the back, big demanding books on George’s area of specialty, astrophysics, which I guess is vital and important but always seems without flair to me, like waiting tables in a restaurant or crawling back to ex-boyfriends on the nights when it hurts you too much to be alone. Adam looked at me like he thought I was cute, which I thought was cute, and I wished again I was a smoker so I could slowly, slowly exhale a nice shimmering cloud at someone as I wrinkled my brow in thought and sketched all my lovers into place.

  “So what do you do, Mike?” he asked me. “What are you doing out here in a place like this, a kid like you?”

  “I graduated from college almost two years ago,” I corrected him. “I’m a writer, I told you. I’m finishing up a new novel.”

  “A novel, huh? How many novels have you written?” he asked.

  “One,” I said.

  “One including the one you’re working on, I bet,” he said.

  “How many thousands of dollars have you made selling footage to the big networks?” I asked.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I was just teasing you, Mike. I’m a kidder sometimes.” He rolled out of bed and stood in front of me, tiptoeing up for a second and shaking his arms out like a dog getting out of the water. “I’m gonna go check the camera,” he said, leaning down to put on his sneakers. “I’m gonna take a piss, and I’m gonna check my camera. I left it running but I can rewind and tape over it. Just in case something happened, which I don’t think it did because I think we would have heard something.”

  “You’re going to walk out there just in sneakers?” I said. “You look like a dirty movie.”

  He strode out to the bathroom. “No one will see me,” he called, splashing away. “It’s warm like California is supposed to be, and we’re in the middle of nowhere, kid. This house is in the middle of a field and the neighbors are probably working a stupid job in San Fran.”

  “I hate when people call it San Fran,” I said.

  “San Fran is what everyone calls it,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “When you get back maybe,” I said, “we could have lunch or some wine. I could—”

  “When I get back,” he said, “I’m going to teach you how to suck my cock.”

  I covered my smile with my hand and he chuckled out of Nora and George’s house. The tall grass in the field made shadows on the wall that I knew I could describe in sentences which would have no equal, but I didn’t think it was relevant for me to do so. That was the trick, I was seeing, knowing what was symbolic and what wasn’t. If the afternoon sun made playful, slippery shadows on the walls like a group of small and carefree children playing childish and innocent games of childhood, then you can’t include them if you’re moving beyond childhood to someone who might figure prominently in at least two chapters of the most important book of my generation. Love is keeping that symbolic focus, each kiss crucial, each step a landmark. I could have read down a list of every important landmark in America and told you what they all stood for symbolically, what it meant if they were to be destroyed. I knew what everything meant and soon everyone else would know too. I just needed to finish it up. I needed to give Adam a name, and nudge all the details into place.

  I stood up and got him in my sights as he walked to check his camera and impede my view, and I couldn’t decide. David? Steven? Something European like Tomas, but more wistful? I walked out of the bedroom to my desk and paged through my manuscript as I looked at him through another window. More than sixteen pages were finished, but I could still see where I thought he might go just when the phone rang as fucking usual.

  “Mommy,” I said, before I could help myself, “I said I’d call you. Didn’t I say that? I’m working and the phone interrupts me. I’ll call when I’m not working, which is hard because I’m working very long hours, very hard, because I’m a writer, primarily of fiction, and that goes with the territory, but I will call so don’t call me.”

  “I’m just worried about you, Tomas,” she said. “I worry about you. I mean, you just shocked everybody on Sunday. Everybody said to me is he all right, they said is he all right out there at Nora and George’s. You just shocked everybody.”

  “Fiction changes every generation,” I said. “It evolves, and some people are going to be shocked.”

  “But Tomas,” she said. “Tomas. I don’t understand what that has to do with your shaving your head.”

  “I told you that heroes always go through changes, that that’s the very essence of a story, that you must capture the moment when something changes because that is what people want to read, and that a shaved head is a symbol, that symbolically the hero shaving his head is being re born, that he is as bald as the day he was born because he is coming to a new understanding.”

  “But you had plenty of hair when you were born,” my mother whined.

  “You’ll understand better when the novel is published!” I shouted. “Then you can read the parts over and over until you get it!”

  I hung up and found Adam grinning at me. “Sheesh,” he said. “I could hear you yelling halfway across the field. Woman troubles, huh?”

  I looked at him and he was naked as the day he was born except for the shoes. “Yeah,” I said.

  “Happens all the time,” he said, staring out the window. “All over the world, I bet. Women complaining, taking the money, no wonder some guys want to blow up buildings.”

  “I don’t want to blow up buildings,” I said, reaching for him. “I think it’s stupid to blow up buildings.” This time I let him hold me, although in the novel, no. But you know that of course, because there isn’t any Adam or Tomas or anything. There’s no wise and sad description of the sun setting and darkening the room in my novel so that by the time we were finished he had to feel around on the floor for everything he wanted to be wearing.

  “Checking on the camera again?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, peering out at the dim field. Then he had a better idea and switched on the TV over by Nora’s side of the bed. White children were taking a big stuffed animal out of a box. “Nothing,” he said. “They’d interrupt this if they blew something up. No way would kids be opening presents if there was another building gone. On or off?”

  “What?”

  “The TV on or off? I’m going to pack up the camera and see you tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “Come back in the morning. They say nighttime’s unlikely.”

  “You might as well stay,” I said. “It might happen at the commute. That’s early.”

  Adam threw his shirt back on. “You really like it, don’t you, Mike?” he asked. “I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll do more. I’ll let the camera run again.”

  “You might as well stay,” I said again.

  “Nah,” he said. “Bad idea, my friend. You better get home too, before whoever owns this comes back and finds a little baldy brat here.”

  I reached to pour myself some more wine but Adam had drunk it all while I was dozing, I guess, because there was just an empty bottle all sucked dry, a perfect symbol for what was going on. “I happen to own this house,” I said.

  “I don’t think so,” he said, zipping up. “I think old people sleep in that bed, because there’s pictures of them all over the place. I don’t think you own a grandfather clock, Mike, or the three bottles of wine I watched you drink.”

  “Like you didn’t have any,” I said. The studio audience laughed at something the brats said on TV, another symbolic thing I’d use if I was going to cheapen my work with pop-culture references.

  “I think you’re someone on the make, like me,” he said. “I think you’re seeing an opportunity like I am. The thing is, though, I can explain if somebody ask
s me. Nobody really cares if I’m in their field with a camera.”

  “I care,” I said. “I care if you’re in my field. I write my novels here because I have an unimpeded view. I don’t want to look at you.”

  “Yes you do,” he said, but he left the room and slammed the door of the house and I just lay there until the end of the episode.

  It was a terrible night in the hinterlands. The wind wailed around me like a keening crowd, like an assembly of mourners for the shallow and overrated state of American fiction before my triumphant arrival on the literary scene. I tried to read some of the books I had brought to nourish me during this time in isolation, but I’ve never been good at reading when the TV is on or when I’m very, very drunk and certain people won’t answer the goddamn phone after thirty-two rings. In the morning I decided I’d let myself have a day away from my desk to let the current draft of my novel really sink in, and I was just opening a bottle of wine when I saw something impeding my view of the city where I grew up, in a restrictive and fraudulent household, before departing for a campus that never really welcomed me only to return to San Francisco and find myself completely and totally reborn and shorn of all my previous and toxic influences. I didn’t even throw my shoes on. Each blade of grass cut like a blade. I realized halfway there that I was drinking Nora and George’s wine out of the bottle, but I thought that was perfect. Desperate times had erased the civility of the gentleman farmer, because it was January 17 and there were two figures at the end of the field, one tinkering with a tripod and the other holding his hands up to the city in the shape of a frame.

  There is no mention of Adam in my novel of our times, not even in the discarded drafts in the back of the annotated edition I have all planned. There is no man in jeans and a linen shirt in my novel. He symbolizes nothing. He would never be targeted, even in retaliation. He is at the bottom of the list of things people want to destroy, and so is the woman with the curly ponytail who paused in her operation of the camera to lean over and kiss him on the cheek, and then, in a phony gesture without even a hint of flair, pretend that she just then noticed me in her peripheral vision and give me a puzzled frown like she thought offhand I was dead but the media’s so unreliable these days.