The Mountain Cage

by Pamela Sargent

  I sought out Jules Pepperman, who had been assigned a house near mine. I had met him at the PanAmerican Games. Jules was tied into the grapevine and always volunteered information readily.

  He was a tall slender fellow with an open, friendly personality and a habit of trying to write excessively ambitious works during competition, a practice I regarded as courting disaster. It had messed him up before, but it had also won him a gold in the Anglo-American Games and a silver in the PEN Stakes. I couldn’t afford to ignore him.

  His house smelled of herb tea and patent medicines. Jules had arrived with every medication the judges would allow. I wondered how he endured competition, with his migraines and stomach ailments. But endure it he did, while complaining loudly about his health to everyone.

  I sat in his kitchen while he poured tea. “Did you hear, Alena? I’m ready to go home, I’m sick of working all the time, the prelims almost wiped me out. There’s this migraine I can’t get rid of and the judges won’t let me take the only thing that helps. And when I heard … you want honey in that?”

  “Sure.” He dropped a dollop in my tea. “What did you hear?”

  “Ansoni. He’s so brilliant and I’m so dumb. I can’t take any more.”

  “What about Ansoni?”

  “He’s here. He’s competing. Haven’t you heard? You must have been living in a cave. He’s competing. In novella.”

  “Shit,” I said. “What’s the matter with him? He must be almost sixty. Isn’t he ineligible?”

  “No. Don’t you keep up with anything? He never worked professionally and he wasn’t a trainer.”

  I tried to digest this unsavory morsel. I hadn’t even known that Michael Ansoni was still among the living. He had taken a gold medal in short-story competition long ago and gone on to win a gold eight years later in novella, the only writer to change categories successfully. I couldn’t even remember all his other awards.

  “I can’t beat him,” Jules wailed. “I should have been a programmer. All that work to get here, and now this.”

  I had to calm Jules down. I didn’t like his writing, which was a bit dense for my taste, but I liked him. “Listen,” I said, “Ansoni’s old. He might fold up at his age. Maybe he’ll die and be disqualified.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I wouldn’t be sorry. Well, maybe I would. Who else looks good?”

  “Nionus Gorff.” Gorff was always masked; no one had ever seen his face. He had quite a cultish following.

  “Naah,” I responded. “Gorff hates publicity too much, he’ll be miserable in a big race like this.”

  “There’s Jan Wolowski. But I don’t think he can beat Ansoni.”

  “Wolowski’s too heavyhanded. He might as well do propaganda.”

  “There’s Arnold Dankmeyer.”

  I was worried about Dankmeyer myself. He was popular with the judges, although that might not mean much. APOLLO, the Olympic computer, actually picked the winners, but the judges’ assessments were fed in and considered in the final decisions. No one could be sure how much weight they carried. And Dankmeyer was appealingly facile. But he was often distracted by his admirers, who followed him everywhere and even lived in his house during races. He might fold.

  “Anyway,” I said, “you can’t worry about it now.” I was a bit insulted that Jules wasn’t worried about me.

  “I know. But the judges don’t like me, they never have.”

  “Well, they don’t like me either.” I had, in accordance with Karath’s advice, cultivated a public image with which to impress the judges. My stock in trade was unobtrusiveness and self-doubt. I would have preferred being a colorful character like Karath, but I could never have carried that off. Being quiet might not win many points, but there was always a chance the judges would react unfavorably to histrionics and give points to a shy writer.

  “At least they don’t hate you,” Jules mumbled. “I need a vacation. I can’t take it.”

  “You’re a champion, act like one,” I said loftily. I got up and made my departure, wanting to rest up for the opening ceremonies.

  We looked terrific in the stadium, holding our quill pens, clothed in azure jumpsuits with the flags of our countries over our chests. The only ones who looked better were the astrophysicists, who wore black silk jumpsuits studded with rhinestone constellations. They were only there for the opening ceremonies; their contests would be held on the Moon. At any rate, the science games didn’t draw much of an audience. Hardly anyone knew enough to follow them. And mathematicians—they were dressed in black robes and held slates and chalk—were ignored, even if they were gold medalists. The social sciences drew the crowds, probably because anyone could, in a way, feel he was participating in them. But we writers didn’t do so badly. No one read what we wrote, but a lot of people enjoyed our public displays. At least one writer was sure to crack up before the Games were over, and occasionally there was a suicide.

  We marched around, the flame was lit, and I smiled at Jules. At least we were contenders. No one could take that away.

  The race began. I worked methodically, meaning that I used my own method. During the first two weeks I wrote nothing. I saw a lot of Rome. A wisp of an idea was forming in my mind, but I wasn’t ready to work on it.

  Jules was slaving away. He would creep along slowly and finish a draft, then take a week off during which he would feel guilty about not working. He had to rewrite a lot. “Otherwise,” he had told me, “I’d be incomprehensible.”

  During the second month, I met Jan Wolowski while taking a walk. He was too intense for my taste. He was always serious, even at parties, and he had no tolerance for the foibles of writers. He was also dogmatic and snobbish. But he was competition.

  I said hello and we continued walking together. “How are you doing?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Still taking notes and working out my plot.”

  “I hate making notes. I like to write it as it comes. But I don’t have a chance anyway.” That last line was part of my self-depreciation routine, but on some level I believed it. If I really thought I was good, some part of me was sure, I would lose.

  “I wrote a good paragraph this morning,” he said. “I have my notebook with me. Want to hear it?”

  “No.” Wolowski liked to read to other competitors. It would bore, exasperate, or demoralize them. He read me his paragraph anyway. Unfortunately, it was good.

  We passed Dankmeyer’s house. He was holding court at a picnic table with his admirers, some fettucini, and plenty of wine. Dankmeyer could turn out a novella in a week, so he was able to spend most of his time garnering publicity.

  “Did you ever meet Lee Huong?” Wolowski asked as I waved to Dankmeyer, hating his courtier’s guts.

  “No.”

  “You should. She may be the best writer here.”

  “I never heard of her. What’s she won?”

  “Nothing, except a bronze in the Sino-Soviet Games years ago. She’s close to forty.”

  “Then she can’t be that great. At that age, she ought to quit.” We passed Ansoni’s house. All the shutters were closed. I had heard he slept during the day and worked at night.

  “I mean,” Wolowski continued, “that she’s the best writer. If people still read, they’d read her. I’ve read her best stuff and it wasn’t what she wrote in contests.”

  We stopped by a cafe and sat down at a roadside table. I signaled to a servo for a beer. The man was trying to disorient me. I knew these tricks. “Better than Ansoni?” I asked.

  “Better than him.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t believe it.” I looked around and saw some spectators. They grinned and waved. A boy shouted, “Go get it, Dorenmatté!” It was nice to have admirers.

  I spoke to Lee Huong only once, two months before the end of our race, at a party for the short-story medalists.

  The party was held in an old villa. The dining room was filled with long tables covered with platters of caviar, various fruits,
suckling pigs, standing rib roasts, and bowls of pasta. I settled on a couch and dug in. Across from me, Jules was flirting with the silver medalist in short stories, a buxom red-haired woman.

  Benjamin MacStiofain sat next to me and grimly devoured a pear. “These Olympics are disgusting,” he muttered. “What’s the use? We come here, we agonize, we break our hearts, then someone wins and everybody forgets about it. I hate it all. This is my last competition.” MacStiofain always said every meet was his last.

  “I heard Dankmeyer finished his novella already.”

  MacStiofain’s mustache twitched. “Did you have to tell me that?” He got up and wandered away morosely.

  Then I saw Lee Huong. She drifted past, dressed in what appeared to be white pajamas. Her small light-brown face was composed; her almond eyes surveyed the room benevolently. It was eerie. This late in the race a writer might be depressed, anxious, fatalistic, or hysterical, but not calm. It had to be a tactic.

  She nodded to me, then sat down on the couch. I nodded back. “Is this your first Olympic contest?” she asked.

  I said it was.

  “It means little.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I replied. “It means nothing … if you’re a loser.” I was being crude. But Lee Huong only smiled as she got up and walked away. Maybe she knew something I didn’t know.

  I remembered what Wolowski had said. What if he was right about Huong? If she was the best, it meant that inferior writers defeated her regularly. And if that was true, it might mean that inferior writers beat better ones in all contests. MacStiofain, I recalled uncomfortably, believed that APOLLO picked the winners at random, although the human judges might give you an edge. The Olympic committee had denied this, but we all knew that MacStiofain’s sister had taken a gold in cybernetics. She might have told him something.

  I had lost my appetite during these ruminations, so I got up and made a show of leaving, waving to Jules and telling him that I was heading back to work. This obvious maneuver almost always succeeded in making the writers who remained feel guilty. Karath’s classic move, bringing his typewriter to parties and working in the midst of them, was one I greatly admired but could never emulate with conviction.

  On my way back, I saw Effie Mae Hublinger sitting on a stone wall with a few spectators. Her game was being jus’ folks, nothin’ special ’bout me, jes’ throwin’ the ol’ words around, but at heart Ah’m jes’ a li’l ol’ socializes Anyone who believed that about a writer deserved to be fooled, or worse yet, put into a story as a character.

  The last month was pressurized. Anyone who could spare the time was playing dirty tricks. Wolowski, who admittedly was erudite, lectured to anyone he saw on the subject of our ignorance and lack of real ability. This upset a few writers, but only encouraged Jules, for some strange reason.

  MacStiofain finally cracked. In a show of poor sportsmanship, he duked it out with a novelist. The day after that brawl, he was disqualified for taking unauthorized drugs.

  They had to drag him away. The robopols put him in a strait-jacket while he screamed that someone had planted the drugs, but we knew that wasn’t true. At any rate, we all calmed down a bit, since a formidable contender was now out of the race.

  Lee Huong kept her equilibrium. That drove Effie Mae Hublinger crazy. With a few of her friends, she camped out on Huong’s front step for three days, creating a ruckus. This infantile tactic only lost Hublinger time she could have spent on her own novella.

  Someone visited Jules and managed to swipe his medicines, unnoticed by the monitors. Even Jules, angry as he was, had to admire such skill and daring. But it was Dankmeyer who created a classic new ploy. Two weeks before the end of competition he handed in his novella.

  Jules, hysterical by then, relayed this news to me. He was having trouble with his ending. He stomped around my workroom, talked himself into utter panic, talked himself out of it, then went back to his house. Even Ansoni had been thrown off balance by that trick. Everyone had always waited for the deadline, revising and polishing. Dankmeyer would be famous. He topped off his stunt with a nervous collapse, which would help with the judges.

  The day before the deadline, Rigel Jehan left without finishing his novella and was disqualified. Poor Rigel, I thought, glad he was gone. He could never finish anything during the big contests.

  And then the deadline arrived. We handed in our manuscripts and carefully avoided each other while awaiting judgment. I went on a drunk in Rome. I came to in an alley with a large bump on my head, no money, and a hangover. I suppose it’s all grist for the mill.

  The closing ceremonies were held two years after the start of the Games. It took that long for some of the races to be completed. The economists, in gold lame, sashayed around the arena, drawing a few cheers. The anthropologists topped them, weaving in and out, then dancing a nifty two-step in their robes and feathers. I wore my bronze medal proudly as I strutted with the others, our quill pens held high. There was, after all, no shame in being defeated by Ansoni, although it irked me that Dankmeyer had taken the silver. He had recovered nicely from his nervous breakdown and was casting friendly glances at me with his sensitive brown eyes. I ignored him.

  I returned to Karath’s villa after that. He congratulated me but got down to essentials quickly. I had only a couple of months to train for the next Olympic prelims.

  Then disaster struck. I had no words left. At first I thought it was only exhaustion. I grew listless. I put the cover over my typewriter, then hid it under my desk, where it reproached me silently. The other trainees whispered about me. I had to face the truth: I had a writer’s block. I might never write again. No one ever discussed writer’s block, considering it indelicate, but I knew others had gone mute.

  Karath was kind and sympathetic, although he knew I could not remain at the villa; he had to worry about contagion. He was too courteous to ask me to leave. I left by myself, one cold cloudy morning, not wanting to see the other trainees gloat, and took a shuttle to New Zealand.

  Blocked and miserable, I shut myself off from all news. I received a few kind notes, which I did not answer; nothing is worse than the pity of other writers. Yet even in that state I had to view the next Olympics.

  Reina Takake took the gold; I found out she had gone back to Karath after I left. I watched her receive it, hating her, hating my former best friend more than I had ever hated anyone.

  That did it. Hate and envy always do. Something jogged loose in my brain and I started writing again. Let’s face it, I’m not fit for anything else. I only hope I can be a contender once more.

  Afterword to “The Novella Race”:

  It probably won’t be surprising to be told that the inspiration for “The Novella Race” grew out of my compulsive viewing of certain sports events—specifically, the 1976 Olympic Games, with its legendary duel for supremacy in women’s gymnastics between gold medalist Olga Korbut and her brilliant young upcoming rival, Nadia Comaneci. It seemed natural to envision writers engaging in such a competition, and even more natural to model a few of the competitors on writers I knew—greatly altered and heavily disguised, needless to say, in these fictional portraits.

  What is so appealing about sports, about watching athletes of any kind at the top of their game, is seeing human excellence on display, seeing people who achieve their skills and their victories only at great cost and through an almost inhuman discipline, yet who also love what they do. At least that should be what is appealing, although there is also the more degraded pleasure of the spectacle, the crass but often riveting display of people behaving badly while competing, acting out in ways that would have been considered such bad sportsmanship in simpler times that the miscreants might have been banned from competition, along with the equally compelling stories about the latest multimillion-dollar contracts and the latest string of commercial endorsements. Much of professional sport seems as much about the human drama— the cash, the rivalries, the grudges, and the tantrums—as anything else; it’s as
if we’ve forgotten what athletics were supposed to be about.

  Of course the same could be said about writing and writers.

  COLLECTORS

  Alberto had bypassed Orleans, where the traffic heading toward that city was as heavy as it had been around Paris. People had flooded into Paris after the announcement, maybe because so much of French life had always been centered there. Whatever happened now, a lot of people obviously wanted to be in Paris when it did.

  To have so many coming into Paris had made it easier for us to leave. The traffic had been heavy on the roads leading to the city, but almost nonexistent on the lanes going out. Alberto had filled the tank of his Fiat right after our arrival and hadn’t driven the car since, so we had enough gas. The concierge at the hotel had let us check out without paying, maybe because by then the exchange rates were fluctuating from one hour to the next and there was no way of knowing how much any currency would be worth in time. We even had a bag of canned food and bottled water. Making my way back to the hotel, I had been caught in a crowd of looters, and somebody had thrust a canvas bag of food at me. The owners of the shops and stores didn’t seem to mind the looting. By then, some of them were standing by the doors of their establishments shouting “Prenez-en” and “Prenez-les tous,” telling people to help themselves to everything inside.

  We left the main highway, then had to detour around a small town. The cobblestone streets leading into the town were blocked by vans. The traffic was thinning rapidly. Soon ours was the only car I could see on the road.

  We followed the Loire along a two-lane highway nearly as straight as the line on a graph. On the other side of the river, I spotted the distinctive dome and stacks of a nuclear power plant.