Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. Some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life.
The assignment this week in creative writing is to narrate a violent happening. Turn in a story about driving with your Uncle Gordon and another one about two old people who are accidentally electrocuted when they go to turn on a badly wired desk lamp. The teacher will hand them back to you with comments: “Much of your writing is smooth and energetic. You have, however, a ludicrous notion of plot.” Write another story about a man and a woman who, in the very first paragraph, have their lower torsos accidentally blitzed away by dynamite. In the second paragraph, with the insurance money, they buy a frozen yogurt stand together. There are six more paragraphs. You read the whole thing out loud in class. No one likes it. They say your sense of plot is outrageous and incompetent. After class someone asks you if you are crazy.
Decide that perhaps you should stick to comedies. Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a “really great sense of humor” and what now your creative writing class calls “self-contempt giving rise to comic form.” Write down all of his jokes, but don’t tell him you are doing this. Make up anagrams of his old girlfriend’s name and name all of your socially handicapped characters with them. Tell him his old girlfriend is in all of your stories and then watch how funny he can be, see what a really great sense of humor he can have.
Your child psychology adviser tells you you are neglecting courses in your major. What you spend the most time on should be what you’re majoring in. Say yes, you understand.
In creative writing seminars over the next two years, everyone continues to smoke cigarettes and ask the same things: “But does it work?” “Why should we care about this character?” “Have you earned this cliché?” These seem like important questions. On days when it is your turn, you look at the class hopefully as they scour your mimeographs for a plot. They look back up at you, drag deeply and then smile in a sweet sort of way.
You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius. Understand what you must do. Switch majors. The kids in your nursery project will be disappointed, but you have a calling, an urge, a delusion, an unfortunate habit. You have, as your mother would say, fallen in with a bad crowd.
Why write? Where does writing come from? These are questions to ask yourself. They are like: Where does dust come from? Or: Why is there war? Or: If there’s a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?
These are questions that you keep in your wallet, like calling cards. These are questions, your creative writing teacher says, that are good to address in your journals but rarely in your fiction.
The writing professor this fall is stressing the Power of the Imagination. Which means he doesn’t want long descriptive stories about your camping trip last July. He wants you to start in a realistic context but then to alter it. Like recombinant DNA. He wants you to let your imagination sail, to let it grow big-bellied in the wind. This is a quote from Shakespeare.
Tell your roommate your great idea, your great exercise of imaginative power: a transformation of Melville to contemporary life. It will be about monomania and the fish-eat-fish world of life insurance in Rochester, N.Y. The first line will be “Call me Fishmeal,” and it will feature a menopausal suburban husband named Richard, who because he is so depressed all the time is called “Mopey Dick” by his witty wife Elaine. Say to your roommate: “Mopey Dick, get it?” Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a large Kleenex. She comes up to you, like a buddy, and puts an arm around your burdened shoulders. “Listen, Francie,” she says, slow as speech therapy. “Let’s go out and get a big beer.”
The seminar doesn’t like this one either. You suspect they are beginning to feel sorry for you. They say: “You have to think about what is happening. Where is the story here?”
The next semester the writing professor is obsessed with writing from personal experience. You must write from what you know, from what has happened to you. He wants deaths, he wants camping trips. Think about what has happened to you. In three years there have been three things: you lost your virginity; your parents got divorced; and your brother came home from a forest 10 miles from the Cambodian border with only half a thigh, a permanent smirk nestled into one corner of his mouth.
About the first you write: “It created a new space, which hurt and cried in a voice that wasn’t mine, ‘I’m not the same anymore, but I’ll be O.K.’”
About the second you write an elaborate story of an old married couple who stumble upon an unknown land mine in their kitchen and accidentally blow themselves up. You call it: “For Better or for Liverwurst.”
About the last you write nothing. There are no words for this. Your typewriter hums. You can find no words.
At undergraduate cocktail parties, people say, “Oh, you write? What do you write about?” Your roommate, who has consumed too much wine, too little cheese and no crackers at all, blurts: “Oh, my god, she always writes about her dumb boyfriend.”
Later on in life you will learn that writers are merely open, helpless texts with no real understanding of what they have written and therefore must half-believe anything and everything that is said of them. You, however, have not yet reached this stage of literary criticism. You stiffen and say, “I do not,” the same way you said it when someone in the fourth grade accused you of really liking oboe lessons and your parents really weren’t just making you take them.
Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in—in—syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.
“Syllables?” you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.
Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than 10 minutes a day, like sit-ups, they can make you thin.
You will read somewhere that all writing has to do with one’s genitals. Don’t dwell on this. It will make you nervous.
Your mother will come visit you. She will look at the circles under your eyes and hand you a brown book with a brown briefcase on the cover. It is entitled: “How to Become a Business Executive.” She has also brought the “Names for Baby” encyclopedia you asked for; one of your characters, the aging clown-schoolteacher, needs a new name. Your mother will shake her head and say: “Francie, Francie, remember when you were going to be a child psychology major?”
Say: “Mom, I like to write.”
She’ll say: “Sure you like to write. Of course. Sure you like to write.”
Write a story about a confused music student and title it: “Schubert Was the One with the Glasses, Right?” It’s not a big hit, although your roommate likes the part where the two violinists accidentally blow themselves up in a recital room. “I went out with a violinist once,” she says, snapping her gum.
Thank god you are taking other courses. You can find sanctuary in 19th-century ontological snags and invertebrate courting rituals. Certain globular mollusks have what is called “Sex by the Arm.” The male octopus, for instance, loses the end of one arm when placing it inside the female body during intercourse. Marine biologists call it “Seven Heaven.” Be glad you know these things. Be glad you are not just a writer. Apply to law school.
From here on in, many things ca
n happen. But the main one will be this: You decide not to go to law school after all, and, instead, you spend a good, big chunk of your adult life telling people how you decided not to go to law school after all. Somehow you end up writing again. Perhaps you go to graduate school. Perhaps you work odd jobs and take writing courses at night. Perhaps you are working and writing down all the clever remarks and intimate personal confessions you hear during the day. Perhaps you are losing your pals, your acquaintances, your balance.
You have broken up with your boyfriend. You now go out with men who, instead of whispering “I love you,” shout: “Do it to me, baby.” This is good for your writing.
Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at it in a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, “I’ll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn’t it?” Your lips dry to salt. Say that of all the fantasies possible in the world, you can’t imagine being a writer even making the top 20. Tell them you were going to be a child psychology major. “I bet,” they always sigh, “you’d be great with kids.” Scowl fiercely. Tell them you’re a walking blade.
Quit classes. Quit jobs. Cash in old savings bonds. Now you have time like warts on your hands. Slowly copy all of your friends’ addresses into a new address book.
Vacuum. Chew cough drops. Keep a folder full of fragments.
An eyelid darkening sideways.
World as conspiracy.
Possible plot?
A woman gets on a bus.
Suppose you threw a love affair and nobody came.
At home drink a lot of coffee. At Howard Johnson’s order the coleslaw. Consider how it looks like the soggy confetti of a map: where you’ve been, where you’re going—“You Are Here,” says the red star on the back of the menu.
Occasionally a date with a face blank as a sheet of paper asks you whether writers often become discouraged. Say that sometimes they do and sometimes they do. Say it’s a lot like having polio.
“Interesting,” smiles your date, and then he looks down at his arm hairs and starts to smooth them, all, always, in the same direction.
8
THE DEAD SISTER HANDBOOK:
A Guide for Sensitive Boys
(Laconic Method to Near Misses)
Kevin Wilson
LACONIC METHOD: Developed by dead sisters in the early 1900s, this method of self-preservation consists of internally processing thoughts and feelings and distilling their essence to one, two, or, at most, three words, which are then made audible. It has since gained immense popularity amongst all adolescents, but is still most expertly practiced by the dead sister. You find your sister in your room one afternoon. She is curled up in the fetal position on the floor. You ask her if she is okay and she is silent, her eyes closed. Finally, she answers, “I don’t know.” You ask if you can stay with her. “Whatever,” she says. You lie silently beside her until dinner. When you sit down to eat, your mother asks what the two of you have been up to. You are about to tell a complicated, easily uncovered lie, when you hear your sister’s voice. “Nothing,” she says. “Nothing,” you then say, and your sister smiles and nods her approval.
LACROSSE: All dead sisters play sports that require sticks—field hockey, ice hockey, etc. (see also Sports and Leisure). Dead sisters are aggressive on the field to the point that it is troublesome to sensitive boys. Come game time, the day-to-day boredom of the dead sister, heavy-lidded, gives way to punishing checks, angry shouts after every goal, cups of Gatorade thrown to the ground and stomped on. When you remember your sister, she is red-faced and angry, racing down the field, eager to cause a commotion.
LAST MEAL, PREPARATION OF: The last meal of the dead sister is always burnt (see also Arson, Minor and Major Cases of). The dead sister puts something in the oven, goes to watch TV, falls asleep, and awakens to the fire alarm and smoking, charred food. This action provides the sensitive boy with a sensory-triggered memory with which to alter his subsequent life experiences. Smoke precedes the death of something. A girlfriend (see also Look-Alikes) burns a pan of snickerdoodles and the smell reminds you of that night, when you ran downstairs to investigate the reason for the insistent beeping of the fire alarm. Your sister is staring into the oven, smoke spilling around her, and she retrieves, with her oven-mitted hand, a single slice of cinnamon toast, burnt to black. When she sees you in the doorway of the kitchen, she smiles, takes a bite of the toast, and forces it down. She smiles again and this time her teeth are flecked with black bits of ash and bread. This is one of the last memories you will have of your sister and when your girlfriend reacts disapprovingly to your insistence on eating the burnt cookies after she has thrown them in the garbage, you know she will not be your girlfriend for much longer.
LEGACIES (ALSO KNOWN AS THE DEAD SISTORY): The family tree of the dead sister is filled with unbranching limbs, categorized by several unusual, untimely deaths occurring exclusively to females. Your great-aunt broke her neck diving into a shallow pond and drowned. Your great-great-grandmother was sleepwalking through the woods beyond her house only seventeen days after the birth of your great-grandfather and was attacked and killed by a bear. Your aunt was smothered in her crib by the family cat before she was a month old. The generational duration of the Dead Sistory is unknown and, by most accounts, unceasing.
LIGHTNING, NEARLY STRUCK BY: In the days before death occurs, the heavy deposits of fate inside the dead sister’s body serve as a conduit for the discharge of atmospheric electricity. In 27 percent of cases, the dead sister is actually struck by lightning, though never resulting in death. It is raining and your sister was supposed to be home hours ago (see also Midnight Equation). You hear the sound of rocks tapping the window and when you look out, there is your sister, soaking wet, her index finger held against her lips. You are to unlock the bathroom window upstairs, which is near the wooden trellis that runs up the wall. You sneak over to the bathroom, unlock the window, and wait. There is a flash of lightning and then a clap of thunder that follows almost instantly. You still cannot see your sister. You think you should go outside, but it is raining and you are afraid to wake your parents. Fifteen minutes later, your sister climbs into the bathroom. She smells of burnt sugar. When you ask what happened, she says nothing, walks into her room, and shuts the door. The next morning, you go out to the yard and there is the imprint of her shoes burned into the grass. It will stay there for several weeks after her death, and it will surprise you every time you look out your window.
LOCATION OF DIARY: Diary of dead sister (see also Papers and Correspondence) is always located in the empty shoebox of her favorite pair of shoes, covered by old quizzes from junior high (see also Above-Average Intelligence But Could Have Done So Much Better If She’d Really Applied Herself). This must be found before parents discover its presence. The best time to recover the diary is during the reception that follows the funeral. You will ask to be alone for a little while and everyone will allow this, considering all you’ve been through. Go into dead sister’s room and retrieve diary. Scan quickly for mention of your name, which is rare and, with few exceptions, without incident (see also Make Hands). Learn things you had always assumed but had hoped were not true (see also Belief That No One Understands Her and She Wishes She Could Go Far Away and Live Her Own Life; Drugs and Alcohol, Abuse of; Sexual Contact with Boys; Sexual Contact with Girls; Suicide, Poetry About). Dispose of diary so no one else can read it.
LOOK-ALIKES: Sensitive boys will encounter between four and eleven women who resemble the dead sister. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to talk to these women, follow them down crowded city streets, or pay them money in exchange for sexual favors. Nothing good can come from this.
LOSS OF BLOOD: Dead sisters are obsessed with the creation and preservation of slight, imperceptible wounds. This can be attained by several highly effective methods including: a needle and a composition book; a razor blade and tissue paper; a syringe and glass vials; and a penknife and cotton balls. One night, while y
our sister is sleeping over at a friend’s house (see also Sexual Contact with Girls), you rummage through her closet. You find a box filled with daily calendars for the past six years. You pick up the oldest of the calendars, and when you look at January 1st, you see a rusty, reddish smudge of what could be blood inside the square for that date. The entire month of January is marked off the same way. The drops of blood in June of that year are slightly darker in such an imperceptible way that you must flip back and forth between the pages of the calendar to be sure. In the most recent calendar, you look at the day’s date and see a dark red, almost purple, drop of your sister’s blood. You stare so closely at every page, every drop of blood, that even after you have returned the box to its hiding place and gone back to your room, even after you close your eyes for sleep, you can only see dot after dot of red swimming in front of your face. After her death, you try to continue to fill the days of the calendar with your own blood but your fingers begin to ache after three weeks and you have to give up.
LOSS OF CHILD: The sensitive boy secretly believes that his parents, if given the choice, would rather he had died instead of the dead sister. In 80 percent of cases, this is true.
LOVE APPLES: Food/drink invented by dead sister, derived from soaking peeled tomatoes in a jar of vodka for weeks at a time. Highly toxic and can cause death if consumed in large enough quantities. The alcohol-soaked tomatoes are placed in Ziploc bags and taken to school to be consumed during lunch, which allows dead sister to endure the last half of the school day. After news of sister’s death is received, discover the jar of tomatoes and take them to your room. Hide in closet and eat every tomato. This will cause severe illness and an impaired mental state similar to mourning.
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, Found Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts Page 7