This
5
SOME books obfuscate their intentions, drowning their meanings in multiple layers of ambiguities, subtleties, and intellectual mazes for the reader to unfurl. This is not one of those books. I am the author and I am about to tell you exactly the meaning and purpose of this novel, and you, the reader (if you ever materialise out of the dreamy centre of my skull), are going to swallow and digest this meaning as the only one, unless, of course, you insist on autonomy of mind, and demand to make your own, which I will politely advise you against as being foolish and unnecessary. Then again, I may decide to dupe you with an entirely false “definitive” meaning as is my wont as author, and you will be clueless as to its falsehood (even after having warned you, how will you know what is true or false?) and you will have no choice but to open up and swallow. Of course, having admitted to the possibility of duplicity in my approach opens up layers of ambiguities (if not subtleties or intellectual mazes), so my opening statement has already been undermined and exposed as a lie. If I were to outline the meaning and purpose of the novel at this point, you would not believe anything I wrote, so to do so right now would be disadvantageous. It would be easier for me to spoon the meaning and purpose of this novel into your minds later on, when you are not so eager to skeptically rebuff whatever explanation I offer based on the lie that I told you (or was it a lie?) about choosing to dupe you with an entirely false meaning and purpose. Perhaps you don’t care about a “definitive” meaning and purpose of the novels you read (whoever “you” are), and simply like reading for the scenery and amusement, in which case you are reading the wrong novel. This one has a definitive meaning and purpose, maybe, if I’m not lying, and you will not escape reading this novel without learning exactly what the author (me) intended exactly, unless I decide to lie to you, in which case, you won’t. Either way, you’re taking a risk, and I am having ridiculous amounts of fun tickling your disinterest. I’ll tell you the meaning and purpose of this novel later, if I choose to.
The Trauma Rooms
5
NEXT up: Syd Lopmound. You may find his manner rather distracted, or distracting.”
“Or both?”
“Or both.”
Erin entered a room where skeins of shredded paper, attached to strings and sellotaped to the ceiling, dangled into her face while Syd Lopmound manically and starryeyedly flitted between them, hoping to chance upon some pearlescent sentence that had magicked itself onto the blank skeins when he wasn’t looking that he might add to his non-existent fictional début. His spiked hair made him resemble an indie drummer trying too hard to divert the viewer’s gaze from the lead singer.
“These are what Syd calls his Ideacatchers. Hello, Syd Lop-mound! This is Erin. She’d like to say howdy-doodle-you-do.”
“Or hello.”
“Or howdy—doodle, do you?”
“Enough.”
“Hang five! I have one here,” Syd said, peering at a wordless strip of paper in wonder. “Damn! Nothing there. I thought I spied a story about a walrus there, something about a walrus eating a mushroom.”
“Yes. Syd, Erin would like to know about your condition.”
“Hang! I see a plot over there! DON’T MOVE!”
No one moved. Syd examined the blank paper with three-parts wonder, bafflement, and disappointment.
“Syd, we’ve discussed this. These words, stories, and plots are hallucinations. Nothing will appear on the paper unless you write it yourself.”
“I swear ... it was something about a mobster taking t’ai chi lessons.”
“That was a recent Danny Dyer vehicle, Syd. Now, if you’d like to tell Erin here what happened to you?”
“Yes. I had recently moved to Brooklyn to become a writer. I had read about Brooklyn’s reputation as a cultural hive, with writers like Jonathan Lethem eulogising its charms in countless books with Brooklyn in the title. I came from Aberdour, you see, so Brooklyn was the Holy Land to me. Anyway, I rented my room from a fleabag on 879th St. and sat down to write. Realising I had neglected to buy a pen, I headed to the stationery store. Upon returning, someone had stolen my notepad. Disheartened, I put the writing on hold to pursue working in a bookstore, because Jonathan Lethem had worked in one before becoming big. On the subway, taking my CV to various bookstores, I would have these tremendous ideas for plots, but always seemed to be lacking a pen or notepad, and so forgot the ideas by the time I reached my destination. I had purchased new stationery and a secure lock for my room, but whenever I sat down to write, I could never latch on to my earlier ideas, no lock pun intended. So I made my rounds of the bookstores, citing Jonathan Lethem as an inspiration, but my accent and overeagerness repelled most of the owners. I took to carrying a pen and notepad at all times, but ideas only emerged when I was powerless to write them down. I tried speaking aloud my ideas to strangers, or asking them to write things down for me, but they predictably shied away from my conversation, thinking me unhinged. I was stuck with these brilliant ideas—and I can assure you, they were fucking amazing—and no means of putting them on paper. This continued for months until I cracked up and returned to Aberdour in a state of shock, having failed to secure a position of idealised employment in a bookstore like my idol Jonathan Lethem.”
“Tell Erin about your Ideacatchers.”
“These are like Dreamcatchers, only for catching my errant ideas. Sometimes I see—or think I see—these ideas—oh wait, is that something about a disco sausage?—written on the paper, but when I pluck the strips, there are no ideas there. The doctor insists I am hallucinating—oh, look, a cargo truck crashes into a primary school!”
“Interesting case,” Erin said, once again seeing no stapler and impatiently indulging the doctor’s explanation.
“The patient is convinced that these ‘ideas’ of his have value. My suspicion is that these ‘ideas’ on the subway were also hallucinations and that his brain, finding itself unable to achieve the desired level of creativity needed to become an artist, went into shock, offering this delusion of creativity in place of actual.”
“But what if he is secretly nursing brilliant ideas, and merely needs the coaching to make them manifest?”
“Come, Erin, you have heard the indigested wiffle he had been coming out with. Do you really believe a genius lurks underneath?”
“No. They are dreadful ideas.”
“Precisely. I need to convince him that he is wasting his time with these runny nuggets and to move on with his life. And with that cue, let us move on to the next patient!”
The Corridor of Cheap Commodities
A Better Life
5
WE achieved a workable solution using a Salamol CFC-free inhaler attached to a mini-pendulum. It functioned not as a five-minute timer—we couldn’t prevent the pendulum from hitting the new-caller button on the switchboard with each natural swing—but as a fill-in finger clicking customers into oblivion in idle strokes. This left callers with 1.6 seconds to fling their complaints into unpresent ears and created a high turnover of calls (37.5 per minute). Since the number of callers was unlimited this left us free to concentrate on other things such as killing the remaining ten old people and usurping their properties, most of which emanated a strong funk of cardigans, insect repellent, and moths decomposing in jars of Marmite. I made the mistake of eating a Werther’s Original from a sweetie tin. It tasted like a lump of earwax. (There was a lump of earwax in the sweet tin—perhaps I had mixed them up).
Once we had taken their homes and set up our switchboardduper in all ten, we founded our base in the least offensive place (Mrs Horritt’s—bleached pristine thanks to her OCD) and deliberated on our next move.
“Clearly,” Pete said, “we have two options. We can remain in these cottages lounging on the sofas, eating a decade’s worth of frozen chicken nuggets and broccoli, taking the air occasionally along the concrete promenade, or we can devise some way to bring about the complete destruction of the ScotCall empire and return t
he world to how it was some fifty years ago, minus the threat of universal technogeddon.”
“How d’we do that?” Rob asked. He realised the stole he had been stroking was a dead cat.
“We’ll have to cogitate on the matter. In the meantime, go fire us up some oven chips.” Pete was talking to me.
Our time cohabiting the cottages proved testing. Unlike his experimental fiction-writing forebears, the magnificent Gilbert and Christopher Sorrentino, Pete was a graceless boor and upfront arsehole, sprawled on the couch sans socks, teasing Rob and me with his Man-Blaster and unfunny X-rated puns. I was forced to do the cooking and cleaning. Rob had a sharp sense of humour and to the delight of Pete nicknamed me The Hausfrau. This caused much chuckling at my expense. Pete didn’t want to clean up the corpses, so I had to drag the dead towards the sea, where they merely bobbed back to shore to be pecked at by gulls. I had to light a bonfire and incinerate the bodies, which caused an unholy stench and attracted rats (from where, I wasn’t sure). Once the corpses were charred to completion we hung around the bungalow discussing solutions for toppling the Evil Empire without reverting to blowing holes in everyone with the Man-Blaster.
After two idealess hours, Pete suggested we go in shooting. ScotCall used persuasion and bland brainwashing techniques to propagate its evil—psychological, rarely physical, violence. Despite that, ScotCall could mobilise an army of killers in two minutes if their profits were imperilled, so I proposed a stealthier tactic such as interfering with the phone lines. Rob had no ideas to contribute and twirled his bowtie (he had taken one of the dead thing’s bowties and was testing its effectiveness in his ensemble). The simplest answer was most often correct. I remembered reading that in a book long ago. To amuse ourselves in between arguing and having no new ideas we answered ScotCall queries.
“I need help. I cannot decide the difference between a prawn and a portaloo.”
“You piss on one and eat the other.”
“What is the difference between up and left?”
“Left is down and right is up.”
“Can you furnish me with a witty quote to include in my essay on the doughnut industry?”
“Go stuff your own hole.”
“Is this dog luminous?”
“Depends.”
“Might I suggest a hermeneutic approach?”
“Never!”
“Is a battered fish bettered when buttered?”
“Bitterly.”
“How do I raise the temperature on cold days?”
“Reach up and twist the knob.”
“Does a leopard with chicken pox have double the spots?”
“A chicken with leopard pox does.”
“Is it possible to reconcile two broken-hearted lovers?”
“Only after dousing them in petrol.”
“Can I swallow eternity?”
“If you believe.”
“Is a button a mammal?”
“All mammals are buttons but not all buttons are mammals.”
“Is it?”
“No.”
“Can I support a privet hedge with bolsters?”
“Yesnobe.”
“Green waders or blue waders?”
“Shoot yourself.”
I became a competent cook and oven-user. My speciality was frozen chips and beefburgers, and I found several robosnail thingies outside and stir-fried them with a dozen strands of grass-substitute I stole from the sheep. Peter suggested I slaughter several sheep to boil haggis (the former national dish when ScotCall was ScotLand—the national dish at the time of writing is a chicken tikka masala wrap with lettuce and mustard). Tired of this samey and punitive diet, I headed toward the concrete fields to bludgeon one of the flocculent idlers. I dealt the killing blow with my makeshift baseball bat and its insides split open, parting to reveal a Gordian of wires and cables. On closer inspection I noted the sheep were nibbling on cables and wires, not grass-substitute (and that I had fed Pete and Rob robosnail thingies with wires and cables—not grass-substitute!). A cursory examination of the wires revealed the word “ScotCall” along their green sheaths, and I wagered that if nibbled down to the nub, mass disturbances could be caused on the lines and help us overthrow their empire. I observed that the reason the sheep weren’t penetrating right down to the nubs was that the wires went between their teeth and they could merely suck and champ on the wires (sometimes being zapped to death and combusting in flameballs).
“If we sharpened the teeth of these mechanical sheep creature thingies, we can have them penetrating the ScotCall lines. If we breed them too, we could have an army of cable-munching annihilators from Hell. Thoughts?”
“Got no other ideas,” Pete burped.
“You get to it,” Rob burped. “We’re busy listening to the Best of Val Doonican.”
“Who?”
“No idea. Music sounds like it was made in the Stone Age.”
“When?”
“Go round up your sheep, fuckyboo. After making us dinner,” Pete sneered.
I hated those arseholes. But I had hit upon an ingenious plan liable to win me folk-hero status four centuries down the line. I proceeded with glee.
The Farewell, Author! Conference
5
AN hour later Gail Adams Galloway took to the microphone to recite her most memorable sentences. “Here we stand in ... no wait, that’s not right. Here we are in the middle of ... no, that’s not correct ... I wouldn’t start like that. I think it’s She was walking in the ... road? sidewalk? farmhouse? The cover of the book I wrote was rural. She was walking on the sidewalk and something about a rabbit. I can’t remember,” she said, looking to the audience for help, searching the hostile and sympathetic eyes for some trace of her words, her lost stories swimming in the pools of their eyes, and retreated. Julian Porter encouraged others to take to the stage, but Galloway’s blankness made them realise that, aside from T.C. Boyle, who had his collected works memorised, no one was confident they could quote verbatim from their own or their colleagues’ sentences, and they all refrained from taking to the mic. This left T.C. Boyle free to step up and resume reading from his first story collection, Descent of Man. A collective moan ensued and conversation sprung up again. The bleak realisation Galloway had implanted in the writers’ minds turned the conversations hostile and defensive. Álvaro Enrigue accused Stephen-Paul Martin of cribbing parts of his oeuvre from a flash fiction he posted online, and Martin called Álvaro a nutcase, and Álvaro muttered a rude remark about Stephen-Paul’s sister as he walked away, and Stephen-Paul shouted that he didn’t even have a sister; Stuart Kelly accused Jessica Treat of neglecting the work of Boeotian poet Hesiod, and Jessica recited accurate biographical information about Hesoid, and Stuart retorted that this didn’t mean she was familiar with his poems, and Jessica refused to quote to prove herself to some “fourth-rate Hazlitt manqué,” and Stuart was too stunned and confused to retort; Andrew O’Hagan accused Reyoung of patronising him about writing mainstream novels and not hanging out with the hip and soi-disant avant-garde, Reyoung replied that mainstream success meant readers, and he had never had one of those apart from his darling wife Candice Filigree, and O’Hagan said that Reyoung had invented a fake wife with a cool name to outdo him, since his wife was plain old Linda Jones, and Reyoung explained that his wife taught advanced calculus to high school students in hideous sweaters and could never be considered cool, and O’Hagan said he was showing off his wife’s intellect in another attempt to outdo him, and Reyoung said that inventing an uncool wife to impress a Scottish hack was not his conversational bag, and O’Hagan opened his mouth wide in a stunned O, in a clever mirroring of the O’ in his surname; Steve Hely accused Javier Marías of writing over-long run-on sentences to fill up the pages, produce more books, and rake in the cash, and Javier refused to respond to the accusation, tilting his head towards a reanimated salmon dancing the cancan, and Hely hurled unspeakable abuse at the back of this tilted head; James Wood accused Lucy Ellmann of inciti
ng hatred at the peace treaty between Russia and Ukraine by sexting a Ukrainian beefcake, and Lucy said that she had been fucking the Ukrainian beefcake as the peace treaty was being signed so could not be blamed, and James said that she had been fucking the Ukrainian under the table where the peace treaty was being signed, and Lucy said that she had been fucking with no sound apart from the rustle of their mutual thrusts on the axminster, and James said that she had shouted “fuck the Ukraine!” several times under the table, and Lucy that she had shouted “fuck me, Ukrainian!” as she came, and that is what led to the peace treaty cancellation and subsequent war, and James said that fucking a Ukrainian beefcake under the table as a peace treaty was being co-signed was the worst possible time to fuck a Ukrainian beefcake, and Lucy said that one never knows when Eros will strike, and that she hadn’t had sex in two years prior to that, so the fuck was splendid and no regrets; Karrie Fransman accused Antoine Volodine of milking the list form to the point of extreme tedium, and Antoine replied that the list form is a perfect means to distil the experience of living without recourse to the banal business of telling one linear tale of one character after another, and Karrie said that lists were for anal retentives, those with Asperger’s syndrome, or writers struggling to think up proper plots, characters, and storylines, and Antoine said that listing was a means of coping with the infinite potential of sitting before a blank page, and the précis was as valid a form as the 1000-page epic, and Karrie lost interest in the conversation and stared at her loafers, and Antoine praised her taste in loafers, and Karrie asked if he was coming on to her, and Antoine said yes, you are fucking beautiful, and Karrie said sorry, I have a fabulous husband named Nate; Affinity Konar accused Mark Z. Danielewski of popularising the blank page, and precipitating a spate of non-books (not in the Benabouian sense) where the occasional random word-speck could be glimpsed in a minuscule font among the wall of whitewash, and Mark said so , and Affinity said that was a puerile response and a waste of half a minute, and Mark said when , and Affinity said he made a compelling argument, and Mark said therefore , and Affinity said that she couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid, and was there any way she could repay him for her stupidity, and Mark said skateboard , and Affinity said she’d rather not as she had a sore back; Graham Rawle accused William T. Vollmann of excess, and William said that excess, inordinateness, nimiety, overabundance, overindulgence, supererogatoriness, superfluity, and surplusage was always necessary, and Graham knocked him out with a punch to the chin before he could utter another syllable. This act of violence proved prescient for how the evening was set to end.
The House of Writers Page 14