Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  With that he opened his briefcase and began preparing to teach the next day’s music analysis class, pausing only to extort a promise that he will be assigned no more lines of dialogue, especially ones like those above, from now until the end of the novel.

  Just then Yigal appeared at the door. In his hand was a page torn from a spiral notebook and marked in a childish, almost unreadable hand. He gave it in silence to Zohar. “‘What the Serial Killer Wants,’” Zohar read aloud.

  What the Serial Killer Wants

  The serial killer wants everything to be love.

  Like an egg, he explains.

  What isn’t love must be eliminated, says

  The serial killer, filed smooth, like

  An egg. There is no place, he

  Says, for what is not sufficiently smooth,

  Round and

  White.

  “Whoever wrote this,” Zohar added, voluntarily breaking his self-imposed ban on speech, “is perhaps the greatest living Israeli writer.”

  “It’s Meyer’s,” Yigal said.

  “Wow, Yigal,” I said, reading over Zohar’s shoulder. “It’s just like in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Khan says, ‘From hell’s heart I stab at thee.’ Also it’s a little bit like the episode with Nomad.” Zohar had already started typing the poem on his computer.

  “I’ve been turning the house upside down, seeing if there are any more of these,” Yigal said. “But I can’t find a thing. I wish we hadn’t lost that little parchment. This can’t be the first and last thing he ever wrote, can it? It’s so powerful. I never thought of myself as a serial killer before, and I never thought what it meant to demand that Meyer love me.”

  “Don’t whine,” I said. “You have to learn to let things go.”

  “That’s your New Age crap,” Yigal said. “It’s like telling me I have to learn to say, ‘Who cares?’ when everything worth having stands on a foundation of memory, responsibility, and sacrifice.”

  Zohar looked up with a pained expression, then went back to typing.

  “So what are you doing for Meyer right now?” I asked. “Remembering him? What have you sacrificed, besides what was probably a better mood?”

  Yigal grabbed the paper and ran off.

  Since my friend David says I should write my memoirs, and Zohar is always saying I should write a book about my parents, I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of:

  THE MAILBOX

  The American tale of a father’s struggle against adversity is a genre in itself. Generally, following the model of Lear, the father harms no one more than himself, and comes to see his folly only after alienating no one more than his beloved ten-year-old daughter, the light of his life. The story typically begins when the father, a white-collar proletarian who works long hours, is sitting one evening in his La-Z-Boy before the picture window, looking peacefully across the shaded lawn to his vegetable garden/bird feeder and sees the deer/squirrel that will become his nemesis. It ends when the father understands that he must submit to nature just as he already submits to his boss, his wife, and his ten-year-old daughter, the light of his life.

  My family did not work quite like that. Also, the challenge facing my father was urgent, practical, and expensive. Our house sat one hundred yards from a narrow but busy country road. Our mail came by Rural Free Delivery to a large mailbox on which I had painted, on one side, a sixteen-inch disappearing gun hurling a projectile and, on the other, a koala. The mailbox bore the rubric “PREPONDERANCE,” which, as our school bus driver often told the assembled children, was a dirty word in Spanish. My father had protested against my mother’s naming the house “Banner Acre” in memory of the Banner Chinchilla Ranch on which his father had spent the family’s savings in the early 1930s, so we chose the name “Preponderance,” which refers to a mounted cannon’s weight at the breech. Once the chinchilla farm folded, my father’s family stayed on the land, and it was there, as a child, that my father learned to use dynamite. Dynamite plays no role in the story of the mailbox, but my father and his father used it to blow a barn door quite a few feet into the air while excavating a basement, and many years later, when my father visited the farm again, he felt compelled to point out to the new owners that most of the dynamite was still there, its paper casings nearly rotted away, on a shelf in the garage.

  One morning we saw that our mailbox was dented. It is well known that young men like to hang out the windows of cars and hit things with sticks. We fixed it. A week later, it happened again, and then a week after that, and so on, almost every Friday night for months. After the mailbox was knocked right off its post, we asked a sheriff’s deputy to sit all night in his car watching it so he could make an arrest. Strangely, he agreed, but he must have taken a nap, for in the morning, our mailbox was gone.

  We bought a new mailbox and started again. The deputy staked it out again. Nothing happened. New players, or at least new equipment, seemed to join the fray: Our mailbox was now regularly peppered with buckshot. But it continued to function, receiving mail, and my father’s grief was held somewhat in check, until it vanished completely, post and all. We set the post in concrete, but late that Friday night, we heard a sound, ran outside, and saw that only a hole remained where mailbox number three or number four or whichever it was had stood. At this point it became clear to us that my father had sworn a mighty oath, for, apparently fearing an interruption of mail service, he had mailbox number four or number five on reserve in the garage, and now comes the truly amazing part of the story, which I still remember vividly and viscerally.

  The new mailbox went up on a metal post attached to a “deadman,” that is, a pipe buried horizontally several feet below the ground. It went up late that summer night (I remember holding the flashlight), and then the watches began. From that point forward, whoever attempted to put a load of buckshot into the Zinks’ mailbox would find himself confronted by a child, aged approximately nine, ten, or eleven (there were three of us), armed with an Instamatic flash camera.

  The two-hour shifts were supposed to be carried out from a clump of honeysuckle that covered a rotting stump about thirty feet from the road, but I recall putting myself a little farther out of the line of fire, up the hill a bit, behind an ornamental spruce tree. My usual shift started at midnight in a pastoral silence broken only by the hooting of owls, the creaking of dead pine trees not yet fallen, and the sound of animals moving about in the underbrush. My feelings of terror were generally low and constant, thus manageable, except when a car came by and seemed to be slowing down, or just before two when my older brother, who took the last shift, would make a game of stalking me.

  At some point came the quiet denouement. My father must have submitted. I don’t know anymore. When I try to remember how it ended, I think only of how I used to scream when I felt my brother’s hand on my shoulder, materializing out of the darkness and silence like a ghost’s. I admired him for it. Tarzan himself, I thought, could not have approached more silently.

  At home, I was a stranger to the learned helplessness of well-brought-up children. When I felt hungry, I would make a fried bologna sandwich, garlic toast, or a meringue pie. If my parents wanted me, they knew how to find me: My father had installed a buzzer system, and two short beeps was my signal to appear “front and center,” standing at attention in the living room. Breakfast was my responsibility. If I missed the school bus, I would run as fast as I could the three-quarters of a mile to a corner where the bus would pass again after making a loop through a housing tract.

  At ten I was already a competent roofer, but my first love was digging foundations. I remember the odd impression things like this made on my classmates. They preferred to play things like “Barbie Is Constipated,” which generally involved putting things in her pants. Mudpies? Is this a joke? I would think, invited to crouch behind a house with a girl I admired in school as some sort of unapproachably cool and popular superwoman.

  How I suffered. I suffered constantly. My
classmates were compelled to appear in plays I had written, horrible, tasteless plays. How I long to know that every copy of these plays has been destroyed. I destroyed my own long ago. I am sure everyone despised me. One by one, all my personal deadlines and challenges slipped past, unmet. I could never climb from tree to tree, and as my ninth birthday passed steeped in sin, I realized I would never be a younger saint than the Little Flower of Jesus. I then pinned my hopes on being the Second Coming of Christ, or at least His mother, but realizing the cards were stacked against me, I chose to become instead the first female cadet at the U.S. Naval Academy. To my horror, they began admitting women when I was twelve. A new idol entered my life, giving Tarzan some breathing room: Sarah Bernhardt. I searched for, but could not find in our local library, La Fontaine’s fable of the two pigeons, the piece with which she won entrance to the Comédie-Française. I memorized the soliloquies of Hamlet, noting that it would have taken Sarah no more time to do so than it took me just to scan them. I read a biography of a contemporary California genius who escaped to college at age twelve, and noticed that I had nothing whatsoever in common with him—I had not gone to kindergarten prattling of dolomitic marble as he had, nor did I learn the alphabet in my cradle. “Your brother is a genius,” my mother explained. “You are merely very bright.” All my attempts to seem supersmart impressed no one. My idea of learning Latin from a book ended in emotional collapse after I discovered that, in addition to acquiring new vocabulary, I was expected to develop some sneaking suspicion of what noun cases might be. I noticed once and for all that George Gamow’s One, Two, Three . . . Infinity lost me around page 30, and despite all my efforts to please my mother on the tennis court, I had no backhand, no serve, and an inconsistent forehand. I played both the fife and the bosun’s pipe too poorly to merit a public performance on either. In other words, I realized, I was a fool. School was constant torture—my pants were all too short—and I would sit under my bed reading the Psalms, trying to befriend the God of the Old Testament who would be with me to help as I looked down upon my foes, their brains dashed out against assorted rocks.

  “Let it go, let it go,” my friend Ms. Jumbo Loopy Chenille would say to all this, and she would be right. People today are often heard to remark that I am articulate. Why should they be made to suspect that my verbal skill, such as it is, originated not in a habit of speaking, but in a lifetime spent preparing a single essay (any length, as long as it might hold the wandering attention of the listener from start to finish) on the subject “Why are you crying?” By the time I first heard the question at age fifteen, I had already reasoned that there might be an inverse proportion between a given subject’s willingness to ask it and his or her ability to understand the response. Therefore, over the years, I prepared and presented many heavily edited, audience-specific versions of the essay. I suspected that the original would easily fill a book, but who would read it? In November 1996, at age thirty-two, I finally succeeded in communicating the essay in its entirety. I wrote it all by hand, and mailed it away. While I wrote it, I lived in a state of angelic peace. When I imagined the recipient reading it, I saw him bathed in golden light. Sometimes I wonder what it said.

  Having delivered myself of my own magnum opus, I was at last ready to turn my attention to the great works of others, such as Avner Shats.

  CHAPTER 24

  THE PLOT OF SAILING TOWARD THE Sunset seems forced and dry after the lurid glory of the mailbox, but being a novel, it must march on. October turned to November, the leaves fell, and the first snow spangled the tree branches—in Vermont I mean—while in Tel Aviv the summer continued unabated, but somewhat less like an oven. With December came the jelly doughnuts of Hanukkah, not unlike those which John F. Kennedy claimed he resembled so closely in his famous speech “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The weather cooled by several degrees, and Mary began to look pregnant. January: A time of frosty chill on Mount Hermon, where Shats sat placidly fulfilling his military reserve duty. February, month of Israel’s arbor day and the cruel holiday of Purim, arrived just as the weeds of the Galilee hit nine feet in height, fueled by the turgor pressure of constant rain on saturated ground. March brought with it huge poppies, daisies and anemones, swarms of birds, and mushrooms. In April four storks passed over, heading for Holland, and Mary had her baby.

  She was perfectly beautiful, downy soft and white, with huge black eyes and long whiskers stiff as nylon. They named her Rakeffet, after a potted plant. Mary bought a cat brush and saved all the fur as it fell out. She never did quite decide what to do with it, and it’s still in the top of their closet in a transparent plastic bag.

  Little Rakeffet was Yigal’s pride and joy, so it was no big shock to anyone except Mary when, at the age of eight weeks, she was found following him around the kitchen with her skin hanging by one leg. “I don’t really want to consider the implications,” Mary said, “but it’s fine by me.” A month later she came upstairs with Rakeffet and the skin, looking upset. “Help me get her into this,” she begged. We pinched and squeezed until Rakeffet squeaked and moaned, but it was no use—we couldn’t get it over her head. Yigal’s parents then materialized and insisted on having a party called a brita, i.e., the feminine version of a circumcision. (Rakeffet emerged unharmed.) Yes, those were lively, entertaining times, but now I should get back to the really rich stuff: “My Memoirs and Parents.” Come to think of it, I should leave my parents out of it, since they might read this far someday, so I’ll just call it: “My Memoirs.”

  “MY MEMOIRS” BY NELL

  When I was eighteen, my mother and I took a trip to Greater Detroit, where my elder brother was in school. After two years on a tuba scholarship at Valley Forge Military Academy, he had chosen to attend the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was majoring, of course, in mathematics, but had elected, in his first semester, to study both elementary Hebrew and elementary Arabic, and his grades were suffering. In the second semester, after our visit, he accepted his tuition money from our mother and used it to buy a very large and even mysterious stereo system. I remember the amplifier well, a silver cube with a vertical row of red LEDs and one knob. His record was The Velvet Underground and Nico. I bought him Songs of Leonard Cohen, and he played them both.

  Together we went to visit a very nice and charming woman whom we all like very much. She had visited us in California in 1966 to bear an illegitimate son, so she had known my elder brother and me from an early age. As we sat in a festive circle around her Christmas table, she turned to David and asked, “Do you remember Nell’s imaginary friend you killed?”

  He did not. Neither did I. She went on to tell how I had possessed, as a very small child, one friend. This friend was small enough to fit in my hand, and no one else touched him. I carried him in my pocket, and when I sat down, wherever I was, I always placed him carefully next to me.

  One day, David and I were playing with a wagon, and in the commotion David saw that my friend was alone. He picked up my friend with two fingers and raised it over his head. I stood petrified in terror, my mouth like an O, the woman said, as David slowly parted his thumb and forefinger and watched my friend fall to the concrete. I remained motionless with my hands on my cheeks for a few seconds, and then I began screaming. I continued screaming for hours, and I never had another imaginary friend, at least not until November 1996.

  After November 1996 I reorganized my priorities along lines suggested by Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil.”

  The little slip of parchment flew on the dry wind. It flew right over the Ayalon Highway, and over Ben Gurion Airport and the monastery at Latrun and Zohar’s sister’s apartment and the walls of the Old City, and eventually it flew right into East Jerusalem, and then across the Jordan, still heading east, at which point everyone lost sight of it as if it had never existed, though it was to undertake several interesting confidential projects.

  Meyer went to live with Yigal’s six-year-old cousin in Kibbutz Be’eri. A year later, he lay on top of a water tank, d
isintegrating in the sun. He turned to lint.

  Zohar and I lay in bed and I told him about my next novel, Volvox. “Remember Vox?” I asked. “This is just like that, except it’s about unicelled flagellates.” There were clear echoes of my novel #0—the novel before my first novel (Sailing Toward the Sunset is my second novel)—which I always assumed it would be my life’s work to write. Titled Autobiography of a Radiolarian, it showed the influence of Solzhenitsyn all too plainly: The protagonist, a small diatom, is caught in a deep ocean current that will take two hundred years to cross the Atlantic and release her off the coast of France, but meanwhile she is forced to confront the globigerine ooze, a vast graveyard of near-infinite numbers of her friends and family. I never wrote a word of it, until in 1993 I decided that the first issue of my punk rock fanzine should include a work of fiction. Modestly, I titled the piece “Fiction.”

  “FICTION” BY NELL

  Rfmx left the sea at the age of four. . . .

  The next few sentences concern her efforts to get drunk in New York City with no money. Eventually, frustrated, she resolves to seek the company of other radiolaria. Rescued from them by heroic baby lambs, she becomes a professional shepherdess, drinking brandy on her back in the Sheep Meadow and watching them frolic and play until her death at age six. The lambs say the same line over and over: “Baa!” I.e., they are difficult to understand, but it is clear that everything they say is positive and that all their intentions are good.