Amy Falls Down

by Willett, Jincy

  What bothered Amy most about Caligula’s Scalpel wasn’t its ludicrous, derivative plot. Serial killers had buzz these days—and while old-genre serial murderers acted that way because they were just nuts or rotten to the core, the new ones were driven as much by the need to puzzle as by lust for torture and slaughter. In fact, most of them were way too cerebral to be lusty. Their killing floors were cathedrals dedicated to their own genius and depth of erudition. Of course Dr. Denton is an amateur egyptologist. Of course he arranges for the Harvard professor to play Holmes to his Moriarty, so he can spar with someone on his own intellectual level. The whole idea was stupid, which was why Amy was so annoyed with herself for not being able to stop reading the outline. What was it about the most hackneyed plot that kept most people, including her, flipping pages? Caligula’s Scalpel was every bit as bad as Skinny White Bitch, yet she was going to persevere, just to find out what happened next, while she could not have been paid enough to see the skinny bitch through to her solitary, rage-fueled, self-affirming, masturbatory predestination.

  What happens to Caligula is that he gets lonely and bored. He pines for the company of his own kind, so he sets out to create an extended family. Following a Byzantine selection protocol, he picks ten of his scheduled surgical patients for experimentation, and after a few mishaps he learns how to alter each patient’s thalamus, limbic system, and prefrontal cortex, whilst simultaneously removing clots, tumors, and other humdrum detritus, and to do this without other operating room personnel noticing. Not only does he turn men, women, children, and infants into serial murderers, but he also implants some sort of Rube Goldberg time-delay for the trigger so they don’t all go off at once. Before long Boston is hip-deep in Hannibals, and it’s a race to the finish between beautiful Clara and the wisecracking detective to stop Patient 10, a United States senator, from eviscerating the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and arranging to feed their giblets to the Supreme Court. Amy stopped reading before the last page. She didn’t want to wreck the surprise when she read the actual draft.

  * * *

  Carla called her within hours of receiving Amy’s terse email, anxious to divulge the identities of the lucky three. Ricky Buzza really was responsible for Caligula. Good for him. Amy cut her off before she could tell her more. “You need to check with these people, Carla, and make sure they’re still interested.”

  “I did, and they are. Surtees isn’t going to take up residence, of course, and Tiffany—”

  “Wait. Are you saying I voted for Surtees and Tiffany?” Amy was dumbfounded. She couldn’t have mistaken Tiffany’s chapter, and who but Surtees could write Womb to Tomb? Not for the first time, she wondered if that Robetussien character had mixed up her MRI results with those of somebody with a perfectly healthy brain.

  “Actually,” said Carla.

  “Actually what?”

  “Actually, I changed my mind about the maximum number. I can take all six, especially since Surtees and—”

  “Damn it, Carla!” Amy never swore, but this was too much. “You just wasted three hours out of my life.” Now she was lying, but Carla deserved it.

  “Look, they’re all really excited. Grahame Troy is dying to meet you.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “She’s a friend from my yoga class. She’s going through a rough divorce, and this is just perfect for her.”

  “Skinny White Bitch.”

  “For sure. She can’t weigh a hundred pounds sopping wet.”

  Amy sighed. “Nobody’s going to meet me, Carla. We had a deal. If they want to work with me online, that’s fine.”

  “Oh, they’re all signed up for that. I just thought we could all—”

  “No.”

  “—maybe once a week, or twice a month—”

  “No.”

  “Okay. We’ll talk about it later.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you want to know about the other two newbies?”

  “No.”

  “One of them you already know. It’s Brie Spangler, from KPBS-FM.”

  “Oh.” That was a pleasant surprise.

  “The other’s an ER doctor, from Escondido. His name is Kurt Robetussien. Isn’t that a riot?”

  Amy stared at Alphonse, who was staring back, head cocked to the left, as he always did when she talked on the phone. Robetussien must have written that oncology nurse thing. How interesting. “Am I supposed to know him too?” she asked, genuinely wondering. “Did he say I did?”

  “I don’t think so. How would you know him? He works at a hospital.”

  * * *

  After hanging up, Amy sorted out her feelings about Robetussien following her all the way into the workshop retreat. Okay, he had pleasantly threatened to send her a manuscript in exchange for that speedy MRI, and now he had followed through, and it was a pretty good one, at least so far. And yes, he was a likable guy. Still it bothered her that he had turned up like this, mingling with people she already knew, and it wasn’t until later that night that she understood why.

  Amy was writing again; she was getting published again; she was on the verge of being rediscovered, and it was all on account of her bizarre behavior during a few lost hours, behavior that meant absolutely nothing if it wasn’t purposive. Kurt Robetussien was the only person in the world besides Amy who knew the truth about it. He was legally forbidden to share medical information about her, but did her accident qualify as medical information? If Robetussien were a character in cheap fiction (The Case of the Baneful Blurb), he’d try to blackmail Amy into pushing his book and she’d have to kill him.

  Well, that wasn’t going to happen. Still she was vexed, and for a time lay awake wondering why. Maybe it was just the loss of privacy. It was one thing to recognize yourself as an unsightly slapstick victim, splayed out on the ground like a circus clown. It was another to be seen that way by strangers. She wouldn’t begrudge their laughter, but their pity would more than sting. The accident was none of their beeswax. If she ran into Robetussien again, she’d have to have an awkward word with him.

  Amy drifted into deep sleep, coming awake again only just before sunrise, in the middle of a sex dream involving her much younger self and Anthony Hopkins in footy pajamas. Not for the first time, Amy blushed in the dark.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Croatoan

  The NPR All Things Considered broadcast of her radio interview happened while Amy was putting the finishing touches on her third new story, “You’re Funny,” about a dying woman who makes people laugh. She begins as a humorless child, chronically disappointed by human behavior and the natural world. While adults exhort her to gape in wonderment at rose petals, rainbows, and the grasping fists of newborns, she has never been moved past mere curiosity to transports of gratitude and joy. She smiles so seldom that her parents, egged on by know-it-all friends, begin to worry. One Thanksgiving, at the age of ten, she surprises her family with a spontaneous smile. (The dinner table, which her father compulsively calls “the groaning board,” actually groans rudely when he sets down the huge turkey, and she permits herself a moment of private delight, which is visible to all.) Her mother notices the smile, and then her aunts, and in seconds the entire gathering is transported to gratitude and joy, which annoys the girl. Remembering what women always say when infants smile, she shoots them all down. “It was probably just gas,” she says. After a long moment of shocked silence, the group bursts simultaneously into laughter and applause. “You made a joke!” crows her mother. She has done nothing of the kind, but instantly understands what has happened: she has said one thing and meant another thing, and apparently this is hilarious. She has discovered irony years ahead of her time. Although she doesn’t understand why it’s funny to say one thing while meaning something quite different, she finds that presenting an ironic perspective to the world is a kind of gateway to social acceptance, and social acceptance (which she does not otherwise require) is itself a gateway to being allowed to live as she like
s. All goes well until she comes to the end of her life—a life spent as a professor of economics, the dismal science; a life spent ironically. She has achieved solid academic success and accidental acclaim as a deadpan wit, the sort who are routinely quoted at parties and to incoming graduate students. One December day she slips on wet ice and, in an otherwise unremarkable fall, drives a pine needle into her wrist. The wound instantly becomes infected. Within hours she is fighting for her life in a hospital bed. When asked for her symptoms, she can manage only, “Terror. Agony. Regret,” and the last thing she hears is the chuckling of an old nurse. She has time for an epiphany—I meant what I said—but no time to share it with the nurse.

  “You’re Funny” was uncomfortably close to a fable. In fact, all three pieces, Amy could see now, might come across as lessons rather than stories. But she wasn’t at all sure what the lessons added up to, and so comforted herself with the notion that they weren’t lessons at all, because they didn’t provide answers. Perhaps they were questions in narrative form. This sounded pretentious, but still it was how she meant them. Or how she thought she meant them. It always bothered her when critics praised writers for being “in full control of their craft.” You were, or should be, in full control of your sentences, but you had no more control over your stories than a sailor does over the weather. And if you do control your story, the weather isn’t real: you’re sailing a toy boat in an old MGM tank.

  She had just sent the story off to Maxine when her phone started to ring. Carla, Surtees, and the Blaines next door told her that she had just been on NPR. This put Amy in mind of that old joke about the guy who put a dead horse in his bathtub, just so when somebody told him there was a dead horse in his bathtub, he could say, “I know.” Amy said “I know” to all three callers, and again later that night to calls from old friends in Maine. She didn’t fill anyone in on the coming publicity explosion, because she was just beginning to believe in it, and it frightened her. Still it was pleasant to say “I know” in an offhand tone, as though being broadcast nationally on radio were no big deal. She jotted down “I Know” in her title list.

  A week later came a frantic call from Carla. “We’ve got twenty new applicants for the retreat,” she said.

  “So what? You don’t have room for more than three, or six, or whatever it was. Just turn them down. And stop saying ‘we.’”

  “But people really want in, because they heard you on NPR.”

  “There’s a way we can make this work,” said Harry B.

  Amy stared at her phone. “Is this a conference call?”

  “Amy, I know you don’t want to teach. But they’re lined up around the block—”

  Carla was exaggerating, but Amy wasn’t surprised about a modest ratcheting up of local interest, since the same thing had happened on her teaching blog: an uptick of people wanting to take her online course—eleven since the NPR thing, so that for the first time she had a sizeable number of people on her waiting list. Amy told Carla this, explaining that she was already dealing with the fallout from the interview and had no time to do anything else, even if she had been inclined to, which she wasn’t.

  Predictably, Carla started to whinge, but Harry cut her off. “We’re not asking you to run a workshop,” he said.

  “Wait! Yes we are, Harry!”

  “Unless you want to,” said Harry. “We’re calling for two reasons. One, we can make money on this thing. Not the residence-retreat part, which is basically a giveaway, but the twenty new people who want to take classes here and they’re willing to pay three hundred a pop.”

  “What’s a pop?” asked Amy, still uninterested, but curious.

  “The usual. Six-week course, three hours a week.”

  “How is that possible? Don’t they know we’re in a recession? Harry, the locals who take these courses are dead broke. They’re living in upside-down houses. Half of them must be unemployed by now. Writing workshops are hardly recession-proof enterprises.”

  “I’m surprised too. Some of them may be spending Christmas money, but the rest are all attracted by your name.”

  “Yeah!” said Carla.

  “But we’ve got a couple of people lined up to teach in your place. Actually, we’ve got enough money to pay three people, these two and you, as a consultant. If the newbies know you’re consulting, and if you agree to deal with them online from time to time, we’ll probably keep them.”

  What two people? “Who are the two people?” asked Amy.

  “They suck.”

  “Carla, put a sock in it,” said Harry. “One is Marva Leaming.”

  “I hate her,” said Carla.

  So did Amy, although she had never actually met her. Marva Leaming had been a local creative writing guru for at least as long as Amy had lived in California. She was teaching at the Extension when Amy first started there, and she still taught multiple classes for them. Her classes had filled reliably, while Amy’s were always touch and go. She had a following.

  None of this would have bothered Amy, except that every now and then she got one of Marva’s disciples in her own class, with noxious results. They badgered her for exercises and thought experiments. She compiled a few of these, just to fend the students off. Write a story backward, using bulleted lists. Write an action story entirely in dialogue. Describe a recent outing, then go back and excise all modifiers. Amy didn’t really see the point of these, and neither did most of Leaming’s disciples. What about freewriting? they would ask. What about metaphor-building? Inevitably, Amy drove them away when, frustrated by their demands, she would break into a rant. How much freewriting do you suppose Charles Dickens did? How about Herman Melville? Has anybody uncovered Shakespeare’s surefire remedy for writer’s block? Amy’s own surefire remedy was to kick out any student who, having contracted to bring in a piece of fiction on an assigned date, failed to do so. It generally worked like a charm. Deadlines were the only cure she knew.

  Every childbirth drama Amy had ever read in workshop had been written by a Leaming disciple. Amy often considered posting a list of verboten topics (nursing home life imagined by eighteen-year-olds; stories that begin with alarm clocks going off) but never did, because it would have been mean. But because of Marva Leaming she learned to warn during the first class that stories about childbirth were cliché minefields. There may have been a time when obstetrical events were shrouded in mystery, but that time was long past. This never deterred the Lemmings, as Amy privately called them, who defiantly wrote at excruciating length about water breaking all over expensive new shoes, dilating cervixes, pushing and not-pushing, and that delirious moment when the baby emerges and all agony is instantly forgotten, though apparently not forever, since the stories, most of them barely disguised memoirs, generally focused on flamboyantly described pain and the central character’s heroic ability to transcend it. No matter how gently Amy criticized these pieces, their authors remained unchastened. “Marva says we should write what we know,” they would say. Amy would try to explain as kindly as possible that this was exactly what they hadn’t done. They weren’t writing what they knew; they were writing what they’d already read a million times before. They weren’t seeing with their own eyes, not at all. Occasionally a Lemming would understand her point, but to no avail. “Marva says writing is communal.” In what universe?

  “Has Lemming agreed to do it?” she asked.

  “Leaming,” said Harry. “Yes, she has.”

  “But only if you don’t want to,” said Carla, while Harry muttered in the background.

  “You said you had two,” said Amy. “Who’s the other?”

  There was a two-beat silence. “It’s not exactly a teacher,” Carla finally said. “It’s a writing coach.”

  “A what?”

  “A writing coach. You know. She’s a motivational speaker, like a life coach. Actually, she’s a life coach too.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Holly Hamm,” said Harry.

  “She sounds like a Christmas e
ntrée.”

  “You can Google her,” said Harry. “It’s not important. Our point is, the point of this call, really, we do have a proposition for you that we think you’ll like.”

  Amy had already Googled Holly Hamm, whose professionally constructed website was listed first on a page full of holiday recipe sites. Holly, while not exactly porcine, resembled a festive Christmas ornament, with a megawatt smile and springy brown hair. She looked like a prep school gym teacher on speed. One of her college degrees (from “Beauchamp University”) purported to be in physical education. She was also a licensed practical nurse, and she was a diplomate, whatever that meant, in “dietetics,” “human psychology,” and “therapeutic choreography.” Though the page promoted her as a writing coach, she was experienced in all sorts of coaching, including, as Carla had mentioned, the coaching of life itself, for which she was also “certified.” She had presented writing seminars internationally, most recently in Rangoon. Her site claimed that she “wore many hats.” She was equally proficient at fencing, storytelling, and dressage.

  “This is horseshit,” said Amy.

  Carla gasped. Amy never swore.

  “It says here that her weekend-long coaching seminars ‘show aspiring writers how to turn their experiences into fiction that sells.’ How can you even think about hiring this person? She’s a con artist.”

  “I see your point,” said Harry, “but she fills rooms. She can help us widen our base.”

  “Amy,” said Carla, “I don’t like Marva Leaming either, but Holly’s the real deal. She can put butts in seats.”

  “How very inspiring,” said Amy. “Look, I have work to do. I’d wish you luck, but that would be immoral. If my name appears in any of your ads, please remove it.”