by Lucy Ives
Harry’s first instinct is to ignore his best friend/fiend, but given that they are several stories up in the air and that Loudermilk is furiously tapping on the none-too-stable window five inches from the end of Harry’s nose, Harry is obliged to respond. He raises the pane and Loudermilk clambers in.
Loudermilk wastes no time. “I’m none too pleased, Harrison,” he says.
“Hello to you, too.”
“Whatever.” Loudermilk has no time for pleasantries. Then, “You’ve never actually been in a relationship so I won’t dazzle you with details but something very unusual has taken place and you and I, Harrison, we need to chat about it.”
Harry is not sure what to say. The afternoon had seemed to be going so well. Now it is Loudermilk’s property.
“I hope you’re not sighing at me!”
Harry stares hard at the blue industrial carpeting of his attic floor.
“I came here to let your numb ass know that we are having a problem. And that problem has to do with your writing, Harry. Because I’m starting to get the feeling that people are beginning to believe that it doesn’t come from me and that, as you know, is not really going to fly around here, here in the land of the author-as-hero. We are getting into some serious T-minus-one dookie.”
Harry shifts his eyeballs a few inches to the right. There’s an interesting snag in the carpet. The window is open and unseasonable birdsong wafts in along a gentle, earth-scented chill.
Loudermilk presses his lips together. “And it’s these females,” Loudermilk says. “That’s where all this weakness is coming from. Marta thinks she controls me, and meanwhile turns out her daughter won’t leave me alone, even though I’ve told that crazy little dick-straddler a million times desperate estrus is only hot for so long. It’s like it makes that head case happy to see somebody playing the game like this! But not Marta. This delusional tease isn’t finding me convenient enough for the next dynasty of her poetry popedom. She needs someone she can ‘mold’ or whatever, like the world’s most genius zombie. And these poems are getting too good—”
Harry raises his hand. “I’m confused. Does this lady not lap milk out of saucers or something?”
“What?”
Harry realizes his mistake. He recalibrates meekly. “I just thought this was the plan.”
“No! This was not the plan. And, P.S., you, Harrison, do not even know what the plan is! The plan was for us to live our simple lives and wet our simple dicks and get our simple cash and now look at what’s happening!”
Harry shrugs.
“Whatever, fucknuts, I’ve been pretty successful in this life thus far. I know a problem when I see one and I’m saying maybe you better beware!”
Harry feels like he might really like to go lie down. He feels dizzy. His face is hermetically sealed.
“This is all your fucking fault!” Loudermilk pauses. Blood is in his face. “You aren’t supposed to let this happen! People are starting to see me.”
Harry wants to say something about how of course people are seeing Loudermilk, because Loudermilk has a corporeal form and he is walking around on the surface of planet Earth, but he realizes that this is not what Loudermilk means. And he also remembers something he read a long time ago about how the devil is the emperor of the air, but he isn’t sure what that has to do with anything.
Loudermilk is currently not doing much more than breathing, and even this seems like a challenge. He hisses, “I need you to do better.”
Harry is about to nod, but at this moment there is an astonishing cracking sound like a gunshot, then a rustling and a long wail and a crashing and a thud.
Loudermilk and Harry lean out of the window.
On the lawn below someone dressed as an abstract expressionist painter is gingerly picking himself up off a tree limb it appears he has been riding astride as if the limb were a tame orca and their current tatty environs were instead the tatty environs known as SeaWorld. The expressionist is cradling one arm and talking to himself as he staggers away.
Loudermilk pulls his head violently back in and yanks Harry back, too.
“You catch that?” Loudermilk barks. “Even that precious ball of bird shits is onto us.”
“At least he doesn’t have a vagina.”
“What?”
Harry smiles.
“Laugh it up, Harrison! What you don’t seem to realize is that we are on very, very thin ice. Everything could fall apart. We could be left with nothing, I’m telling you. We could be totally fucked. They’re watching now,” Loudermilk pronounces in a voice starched with ancient paranoia.
Harry can’t understand why he’s as calm as he indubitably is. Maybe it has something to do with how he, unlike Loudermilk, doesn’t have anything to lose.
Forty
Détente
It’s now been a little while since Harry has seen Loudermilk. Loudermilk did not show up for his regular poetry pickup, and since that day, which was approximately three days ago—although Harry barely keeps track of the day of the week, much less the date—there’s been nothing, not a crudely misspelled note slipped under his door by one of his housemates/employers, nary an email nor a distant sighting. The line has gone dead. Not to mention that Harry now has a couple of poems standing by.
Today, which is probably a Friday, which Harry could find out for sure if he went outside and looked at a newspaper, already feels pretty long. The hours are growing and it is nearly noon. A calm light is making an appearance in the backyard and in the tops of the twin pines. Harry is deliberating about maybe paying a visit to the shack. He’s trying to imagine the likely conversation:
Harry: [greets Loudermilk]
Loudermilk: [unlatching multiple bimbos from his virile person, wiping whipped cream and cherry lube from face and chest] The fuck you want, dude?
Harry: [incoherent mumbling regarding poems]
Loudermilk: Excuse me?
Harry: [further incoherent mumbling]
Loudermilk: Dude, did I not tell you not to interrupt me in the middle of my existence that is so infinitely better than yours? It irritates me when you appear here, reminding me of the fact that I’m somewhat dependent on you for my lifestyle.
Harry: [silence]
Loudermilk: I take it I did not make myself clear. Kindly leave?
Harry: [something about how he does not know where else to go]
Loudermilk: [suddenly able to understand what Harry says] But, Harrison, is that my problem, that you don’t know where else to go? I can’t be responsible for everything that’s wrong with you. I’m not, you know, you. Not in reality. I’ve been helping, I’ve been over here helping and being an altruist, you know, but let’s not take things too far. There comes a time when even the closest friendships have to end, and I know I’ve been pretty damn patient with you, pretty damn giving, if I do say so myself. So this is hurting me more than it hurts you. I’m just going to come right out here and say it: It’s over between us. I don’t need your poems anymore.
This imaginary conversation stands forth in Harry’s mind. It’s prominent and it gleams. It’s very clear and hard for Harry to avoid. It’s possibly constructed from finely etched crystal. It emits a high-pitched noise.
Thus there is no point in going over and talking to Loudermilk because Loudermilk is just going to formalize whatever break Harry believes has already taken place at some misty, symbolic level. Loudermilk will repay Harry’s curiosity by making something currently uncertain into something very determined and very, very real.
Harry is not sure what you’re supposed to do if you end up in a relationship with someone who may at once be a sociopath and/or pathological liar, plus situational narcissist, and/or suffering from a personality disorder, and then you also feel like they are the only person in the world who’s ever understood you. Harry had enough problems to begin with, and now he has to wonder why he chose to exacerbate things. Not that he felt he had a choice at the time. On the one hand, now he’s basically trapped in a s
orority in the Midwest in a town where almost no one knows of his existence; on the other, at least he feels calm enough to actually contemplate what the hell is going on. Are there any healthy people in this world? And, if Harry were to find them, would they accept him? Since Harry, if benign, yet has a certain amount of difficulty with the idea that he is not pretty sick himself.
Harry is about to get up and fix some instant coffee when there is a small noise. It’s a brief clacking sound, and it sounds like “Pack!” It’s at the edge of his window. It happens again: “Pack, pack, pack!” in quick succession. It takes Harry a second to realize that someone in the backyard is bombarding his retreat with bottle caps from the sorority’s lawn.
Harry looks down at the page in front of him. He has been toying with a couple of abstract remarks that may or may not become lines in his next poem:
You might need handles—just handles of a different sort
Some of his military credibility will rub off
He likes the line about handles. It’s definitely weird; it offers itself up strangely, with a single concrete term. It’s all Harry can do to sever his attention from the page to heed the missiles. The cap-thrower might, Harry reminds himself, be Loudermilk, in which case, he should go to the trouble of poking his head out, perhaps ask what in the hell is going on.
The caps continue.
Harry leans awkwardly over the counter to open the window.
A cap sails into the room and lands on the floor behind Harry.
Harry waits a moment, puts his head out.
Standing in the yard is someone who is, very definitely, not Loudermilk. The person has made a collection of bottle caps in the front of his shirt, employing the garment as a cap hammock. It’s no small feat, given that the person is also carrying a sheaf of papers, while additionally having a broken arm.
Harry supposes that he shouldn’t be surprised at the return of Anton Beans. And, when he reflects on it, what actually surprises him isn’t Beans’s presence, but rather his own reaction to it. Harry finds himself completely unperturbed.
Beans’s face, indistinct since distant, appears mild. The mouth is turned down. He isn’t saying anything. He just stares up at Harry’s window. And then, with the hand of the unbroken arm, Beans points at the papers tucked between cast and sling. Beans advances, still indicating papers, plus broken arm.
Now Beans beckons. Harry understands that he is meant to come downstairs. As if to confirm the comprehension slowly dawning on Harry, Beans, magically, nods. Beans is solemn, maybe calm. Maybe this is OK.
Harry removes himself from his room and begins making his way down the back staircase, the building’s sole acknowledgment of fire code. He thinks about how, if he goes slowly enough, Beans may just leave on his own. Harry numbly exits onto thawing sod.
Beans is still there and seems to prefer to maintain a distance. Perhaps it has something to do with his injury. “Greetings,” Beans says.
Harry feels like an astronaut who has just clicked open his polycarbonate visor to discover that it is possible to breathe the atmosphere of an unknown planet.
“Thank you for coming down from your, um, hermitage.” Beans frowns more deeply. “I understand that that is not a simple matter for a person like—” Beans pauses. “Like yourself,” he concludes. “However, I have something that may make your psychosomatic risk-taking worth your while.”
Beans is wearing gray today. He has on gray pants and a gray shirt and, somehow, what appears to be a gray jean jacket. His sneakers and socks are also gray. The ensemble gives him a somewhat gentle, avuncular look, lessening the severity produced by the bushy chinstrap.
It must be that Harry has to acknowledge or encourage Beans, but Harry cannot, for the life of him, fathom how. Harry remains planted where he is, as meanwhile Beans approaches, stiffly bearing his broken arm. Beans removes the papers from their secure spot, passes them, with a flourish, to Harry.
It is a new packet.
“I thought,” Beans is saying, “that this might interest you.”
Harry pages through. It’s all almost as usual. There’s the name of the spring workshop on the cover, and the packet has the customary heft. There are a few sonnets and a few experimental things written on typewriters that sprawl across the page. There isn’t anything by him in here. He can somehow sense this, just by touching the pages.
Perhaps concerned that Harry is not picking up on his intended message, Beans, in his capacity as world-altering Hermes, snatches the pages back.
Part of Harry’s mind, the part that is not struggling to work through the non-presence of a poem attributed to T. A. Loudermilk among the verses of the stapled Xerox, reflects that this is becoming quite the interesting pantomime.
“Look at this,” Beans is saying, holding the packet open against his cast. “This,” Beans, hissing, repeats. Beans flicks the page, producing a sound.
It’s a short poem, attributed to someone named “Troy Loudermilk.” It reads:
The CNN Blues (Persona Poem)
Watching CNN in the bar gets me down.
You realize how stagnant humanity is.
Extraterrestrial radio signals are wound
On the same spool as Oscar dress choices.
Watching CNN in the bar just gets me down.
It makes me wish for a dictator.
Citizens are supposed to act as the neurons
In a massive cognitive web of terror.
Watching CNN in the bar truly gets me down.
Democracy now does seem so baseless.
I’m a stupid fear-based monkey man
And celebrities turn me genocidistic.
We’re chitchatting ourselves into oblivion.
Watching CNN in the bar gets me down.
Forty-One
Worlds
Lizzie is the tiniest bit nostalgic. The mood usually comes on when she ponders the fact that in a matter of years—one year, to be precise—she will be exiting this absurd Podunk, never to return. Often the feeling arrives in late afternoon, when she is wandering her parents’ sizable house. No one else is home; it’s just Lizzie, plus whatever ghosts of her parents’ codependent misery happen to be available.
Lizzie is in Marta’s closet. This isn’t the closet in the master bedroom. Rather, it’s the closet in Marta’s study, where Marta stores her version of the Seminars’ institutional memory, along with the institutional memory of her marriage. Lizzie is, if not exactly equivalent to the poems written by Marta’s students, then pretty much analogous. Which is why, Lizzie believes, Marta stacks and sorts and stows all the packets from her workshops next to her library of family photo albums, filled with images of various Lizzies. It’s all of a piece, as far as Marta is concerned, no difference between the job and the home, the people she teaches and someone she might have given birth to, the stress of marriage, and striving after academic success. Marta has it all, and here is the proof.
Lizzie’s hunting for evidence of her own juvenilia, the time in the first grade she composed a poem for a school-wide writing contest and—as a semi-illiterate and thus extreme underdog—won. The poem rhymes and it somehow means something to Lizzie. It indicates Lizzie’s sophistication, even previous to schooling, previous to actual human culture, and proves that Lizzie’s life will be confined neither to Crete nor to the vicissitudes of her parents’ alliance. In photos, a diminutive Lizzie accepts a bouquet. She is a very young artist.
Lizzie wonders if maybe this event could become the basis of a college application essay. It could be a preview of her current efforts.
Lizzie drags a side chair into the closet. She tests the chair’s stability, steps up. It brings her to eye level with the shelf supporting packets plus photo albums, side by side. Lizzie peruses the row of photo albums, their irregular shapes and spines. She decides to push these volumes aside for some reason, peering into the remote closet dark. She notes that an errant packet has been placed, not along with the nominally organized packet archive, bu
t behind the albums. And this rogue packet seems to have been conveyed to its current resting place in haste, if not anger. Lizzie takes hold of it, descends. She drops down into her mother’s wicker desk chair to read.
This packet isn’t a packet from Marta’s class, and it isn’t even a poetry packet. It’s a packet from a fiction workshop taught this semester by a visiting instructor. The visiting instructor is youngish—though, when Lizzie pauses to think about it, not really so, so young. The visitor has an air of arrested development, favors bright dresses. Her yellow hair is cut into a bob.
Internally, Lizzie sneers. There is a parrot on the cover of the visitor’s first novel, a meandering parable regarding an adorable postmodern stowaway. It’s a book for nerds. Lizzie has been forced to attend related events. Publicly, at least, the Hillarys move en famille.
Lizzie attempts, with middling success, to force the aberrant rage she feels into her stomach.
She is looking at the story. The story is titled “The Origin of the World.” It’s by someone named Clare Elwil. Because Marta, strictly speaking, does not pay much attention to what occurs on the fiction side of things, Lizzie decides she will read it. Marta has gone so far as to circle the story’s title, penciling in a cryptic note:
The hinge of writing allows the author to connect her two unknowns. We see in both worlds.
Forty-Two
Recognition
Workshop is over, and Clare is alone in her room. She experiences what has transpired as a shifting pool of ease, a gentle affective estuary. The room has few hard edges. Even austerity is a pleasure. Downtown, a siren wails.
They read her story. The class did. She does not want to characterize this event, but it has not gone poorly. It was, at any rate, an event. Things are different.
Clare thinks about the game she has played with herself. She has told herself that she is not the one writing. She has given herself permission not to write. She might be anyone; who cares who is doing the writing. And yet, they praised her—and they have praised her unique style, her surprising lack of compromise.