by David Gordon
“So tell me more about Galchen.”
“Well . . .” I searched my mind for more tidbits. “Actually this is funny. You know that ‘20 Under 40’ thing in The New Yorker?”
“But of course. Galchen is one of these to watch!”
“Well, I’m a character in her story. Isn’t that funny?”
“What?” She stopped me in the middle of the street. It was a narrow Chinatown lane, a crooked path through the tilting buildings in the ancient part of town. The crowd swept ceaselessly around us, like the current parting for a rock, softly shoving. The look on her face was very serious, as if I’d revealed a dire medical condition. “You are inside the story?”
“Yeah. I mean not really. It’s kind of her little joke. Her narrator has a friend named David who shows up to borrow money for his teeth. I’ve never borrowed money from her, at least not yet. Though I admit she’s offered. It’s also true I’ve had a lot of dental work, mostly because of my childhood illnesses, you know when you have high fevers you don’t get the normal enamel, but I mean they’re very healthy now and clean and look OK . . .”
“Please . . .”
I trailed off. She had leaned into my shirtfront, and her long hands were splayed against my chest, as if she were trying to peer into a window. “Please, I have never met a really fictional character before.” Her small face gazed up at mine, eyes glowing. “You are like a phantom,” she said as her nails pressed through to my skin. “Please,” she said, “kiss me,” and I did. I folded my arms around her, and our mouths met, and we hung like that for a long time, eyes shut and lost in the darkness. I felt the surging, endless crowd brushing past me and kept one hand on my empty wallet. I tasted spicy salt on her lips. She whispered wetly in my ear: “Imago, imago, my phantom . . .”
As soon as Leticia left my bed the next morning for the library, I rushed to meet Rivka at the Hungarian Pastry Shop and tell her the whole story. “That sounds wonderful,” she said, nibbling a single macaroon. She has the smallest handwriting and the tiniest bites of anyone I know. I made a mental note to tell Leticia this over dinner that night. She sipped her tea and smiled. “Maybe you’ll end up in Buenos Aires, living in noble literary exile like Gombrowicz.”
“I hope not. Gombrowicz almost starved. Actually I remember a guy that Bud and Pascale introduced me to. He was doing research on how, while Gombrowicz was in exile in Argentina during the war, he was desperately poor but still too snobby to associate with the other Polish émigrés. But apparently there’s some suggestion he used to hang around the docks, consorting with lowlifes and hustling for his bread.”
“Aw, see, that is just like you,” Rivka said. I scowled. She still had like 97 percent of her cookie left. I had consumed my three in three stuffed mouthfuls. “Anyway,” she said, “I’m honored that my little story played a supporting role.”
“Your story is the hero of my story,” I told her. “That’s what did it. And let’s face it, this is the only way I’ll ever get in The New Yorker. Though I did have to deflect that business about the teeth. And she didn’t even want to read my book.”
“Which book?”
“The new one. Psoriasis. It’s depressing. I’m still a nobody, even to the girl I’m sleeping with.”
“Yes, but a beautiful nobody. She just wants you as she found you. You don’t even have to impress her or be anybody. You’re just her dream. I think that’s wonderful.”
“I guess.”
Anyway, what did it matter? Leticia was a dream girl, and if her fetish was having sex with a fictional nobody, I wasn’t about to object. In fact, she was already looking into setting up some speaking engagements for me in BA, and said it was quite possible she could arrange a fellowship so that I could spend six months there. I could fly down in the fall, when it was turning cold up here. It would be their spring, and in that upside-down world I’d be a well-known and respectable phantom with a beautiful lover. Here I had been a nobody forever, and it didn’t seem to do me any good at all.
When I got home from the pastry shop, I could see that she’d been crying. Her battered suitcase was packed.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s wrong? Bad news from home?” I reached out to comfort her, and she recoiled.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed. “Don’t you ever touch me again.”
“What? What is it? What’s wrong?”
She gave me a vile look, then turned her gaze to the window. “When Galchen said in her story that you were a writer of the magazine Hustler, I think this is a magazine of literary cowboys who sing poems, like we have in my country. But then I was carrying forward with my research into you and I found this.” She pointed at my computer.
Now it so happens that, back in my leaner and hungrier days, I wrote a good deal of porn, all of it long forgotten. Apparently, however, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, Leticia had located some of the particularly nasty “true” stories I’d produced, mostly under the pen name MFA (Master of Fine Ass).
“But that’s just fiction,” I told her. I even laughed at the absurdity of it. “I made it up for money. It’s not real. Not like us.”
“Real? We are not real.” She had tears in her eyes. “This is the real you. A monster.”
“But this is crazy,” I said, pleading now. “What about us? What about our trip?”
She pointed a long claw at me. “If you ever come to Buenos Aires, one of my brother will cut your throat.”
She left. I hung by the open door, floating more or less in the same spot as when I’d first seen her letter. The only sign that the whole affair had ever really happened was the sad pair of damp brown socks I found later, dangling limply from my shower curtain rod. I called poor Rivka again, and she made soothing remarks but didn’t really seem all that surprised. I suppose it was never that realistic to begin with. Or perhaps she suspected it was all a delusion.
It was not until late that night that curiosity (and curiosity about ourselves is the worst kind) overcame depression and I found myself using the “history” function on my computer’s browser to re-search Leticia’s research into me. I came across some old stories, and I had to admit, Leticia had a point. They made disturbing reading. I almost said they were disturbing to reread, but in truth, I didn’t even recall writing them. It had, after all, been ages, another life, another city, a whole marriage ago.
As I read these absurd ramblings of a seemingly depraved and disordered mind, what I remembered was sitting at my desk during my lunch break, often with my shirt and tie off so as not to drip mustard on my dry-cleanables, squinting at a set of slides I’d been handed moments before, trying to concoct some vaguely plausible narrative or motive for what the bodies in the pictures were getting up to and still get out for a quick smoke before 1 p.m. A tableau featuring two aproned girls, a dude in a chef’s hat, and a cornucopia of veggies became “Bottom Feeders,” and a story about two competing female pool sharks and an audience of, for some reason, nude men was called “Eight Balls in the Side Pocket.” None of this rang a bell, though I confess the fable “Good Pet, Bad Bitch” did remind me of the cages I saw when, as I child, I went to adopt a puppy and had nightmares for months after. Was that the key? Scrolling through the links, I found my own work reused over the years, without royalties, for murky foreign sites like Asian Auction, Whores de France, and, most grimly of all, Ass Atlas of Romania.
My ex-wife had despised those writings, refusing to read them and wondering aloud about the spiritual damage they caused while also complaining about how little they paid. As for myself, well, they really had nothing to do with my “self.” My real, primal motive had not been lust but fear, fear of the mailman and the phone and whatever bad news they might bring. I also wrote ad copy for a yoga center, edited grant proposals for a choreographer, and proofread legal documents: That didn’t make me a dancing Buddhist lawyer.
But isn’t this always the case with writing, even the most supposedly personal? Nothing ever turns out as I i
ntend. Nothing I wrote yesterday looks familiar. I can hardly believe it’s my handwriting in the morning or unscramble what I scribbled when I dreamed that big idea the night before. And like dream work, fiction takes the bits of real life and its concerns, both grand and petty, recent and ancient, remakes them, and presents the results as a clueless puzzle that only leads us deeper into the dark.
Shortly after I penned those gems, my wife left me for someone who she said better understood her needs. I moved to New York, quit smoking, burned through several aborted careers, and produced a pile of fiction that I called by my name but that seemed as inscrutable as Romanian porn. What the hell was I talking about anyway? But that night, for the first time in a long, long time, perusing “Confessions of a Bi-Babysitter” and “Yanna: Milkmaid at the Stud Farm,” I actually found my own work sort of compelling.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one. As I pored through the evidence, I detected a second set of fingerprints. Someone named, or screen-named, “delayeddelights” had repeatedly searched for, posted about, and responded to “me.” Like a towered princess in a distant galaxy, delayeddelights had even sent a number of distress calls out into the universe, wondering where I, or he, was. Finally, past midnight, and years out of date, MFA sent back a hello. I stood guard over the dark screen for a while, watching the far horizon for a response, then had cookies and iced mint tea. I was busy flossing when her light flickered on and she asked, with a parenthetical, side-ways smile, if I’d like to chat.
As it turned out, delayeddelights was a 20s F living in Wburg, where she was a student and a part-time dog-walker. She’d been in high school when she first discovered my work, a middle-class kid lost in the vast suburban reaches of Long Island, struggling with some sticky young feelings and ancient pitch-black urges she couldn’t talk about with her off-line, real-time peers. Angelic in the photo she sent—blond, slender, freckled, laughing in the sunshine with a puppy—she apparently had the mind of a middle-aged pervert, as she visited and revisited my most far-flung creations, declaring “brilliant” and “so fucking hot” the sterile fantasies I had composed one-handed while gobbling my tuna sandwich.
“I thought I was crazy,” she told me on the phone. “I thought I was the only person in the world who had these feelings. I’d give my math teacher what I thought were like smoldering looks—he was fat and ugly, but the pool of older men was really limited—and he just looked at me like I was nuts.” Her voice was bright and clear and somehow more troubling for being so straightforward. “I’d drop hints to my friends, like did you ever hear about people doing this or that, but when they got grossed out, I’d pretend to be kidding and be like, yeah, isn’t that weird, while inside I was dying. Then I saw your stories. They were exactly like my fantasies, but better even, things I’d never imagined. I got so excited it was like I had a fever. Then later I’d feel guilty. I’d think, who does this guy think he is, and get mad and report you and demand you be taken down. Then I’d go read it again. I got older and I moved to Brooklyn and went to college and met some guys, but I was always comparing them to you. Or like I imagined you. You were like my secret. And now here you are. The dirtiest man ever.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I think.” I told her what my ex-wife and Leticia had thought.
“They didn’t understand you,” she assured me.
“They didn’t? I was afraid that they did.”
“Or maybe they’re really reading them right now. I bet there’s hundreds of women, all over, who read your words in secret.” She said she’d found Leticia’s previous articles online and emailed me the link to a six-month-old academic journal. There was a photo of me, with the caption “Personaje ficticio difunta”: Dead Fictional Person.
“But I love the beard,” delayeddelights told me. “I like you scruffy.” She hesitated. A puppy yelped in the background. “Do you think, maybe, we should finally meet? Talk or whatever? Have a drink? We can do whatever you want.”
Should I go? It was late. I was already in my pajamas. How would a guy like MFA dress, anyway? In a mask and cape? I was tempted to ask her to wait and then call Rivka, but there wasn’t time. “I don’t even know what I want,” I told her truthfully.
“That’s all right,” she said. “I do.”
I could hear the excitement quivering in her voice. I imagined her body pressed against mine, fierce little heart beating like a bird. The one thing I knew for sure was that I would ruin it somehow. I would lose it all. I agreed.
“Hurry,” she said. “I love your writing! Take a cab. I’ll split it.”
“No problem,” I declared, counting my singles, “I got it.” I told her about my experimental Psoriasis and offered to bring the manuscript.
She thought about it. “That’s OK. Maybe another time.”
O dirty love! O dawn! O darkness! The heartbreak of this world is that it could be so perfect, if not for me. And then, like a phantom, like a dark master of the finest arts, like a ghostwriter from the invisible world, I set out to cross that river and touch the unknown shore.
Su Li-Zhen
On a rainy day in April, my ex-girlfriend Nina called me for help.
“What kind of help?” I assumed it would be money or lifting things.
“Research,” she said. “I need to look up something and you’re the biggest brainiac I know.”
“Am not.”
“Are so. You’re all quotey and everything.” She was teasing me for the bookish references that compulsively peppered my speech. Frankly, it hadn’t to do with brains so much as a lack of outside stimuli. I’ve spent my life in a room, reading. All I had to report at dinner is what Genet or Nabokov said that day. Nina’s own favorite authors were a heady brew: Ayn Rand, Rumi, and Aleister Crowley.
“What’s this about anyway?” I asked.
“I have to track down my ex-lover.”
“What?” I was a bit incredulous.
“Don’t be jealous. He’s my lover from a former life.”
Nina was an odd girl. I won’t go into our whole relationship; I’ll just say that we fascinated each other in a way only possible for those with absolutely nothing in common, like an anteater and a flamingo meeting at the waterhole. I remember the one Christmas Eve we shared. She dragged me to church with the rest of her brightly blond clan, sang about Jesus with unnerving gusto, then gave me a framed nude photo of herself as a gift. She was a ballad-singing, break-dancing, DJ-ing actress-model-dancer whose great ambition was to be a pop star or appear in a sitcom. She got by on the occasional overseas toothpaste ad while moonlighting at a midtown massage parlor where, dressed in a bikini, she oiled up and rubbed down tense businessmen for $250 a pop, as it were, plus tip. I pictured a kind of human car wash where tiny elven girls pumped and polished the hoary carcasses of old husbands, detailing them like the fat, sleek vehicles they drove home. Although a dozen years her senior, I was still the youngest and poorest boyfriend Nina had ever had.
Early on she complained that I didn’t treat her with the “reverence” and “worshipful attitude” she’d come to expect. Apparently, other reviewers had praised her lavishly as “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” Letting her so much as touch her wallet when accompanying her in a shop was “a major faux pas,” which, frankly, made her feel embarrassed for me. I could only laugh. She fell pretty short in the old-fashioned girlfriend department herself: When I was sick in bed for a week, she didn’t bring me soup or even visit. She admitted it hadn’t so much as crossed her mind. She’d never risk losing her voice. Maybe we were both no good.
Still, like I said, I sit in a room reading, and to see her DJ before a crowd of jumping kids or performing her Qi Gong exercises in the morning, swinging her arms and bouncing up and down in her underwear—well, it was like a breath of life. What she saw in me, who knows? The truth is, in the end, she even started cooking for me, awful concoctions that I wolfed gamely while, suspicious but happy, she slopped seconds onto my plate.
Nina had once lived in Ta
ipei, years before. She’d been recruited as the white member of a multicolored girl-pop group, recorded one minor hit, and been the lover of a Chinese gangster. Or maybe not a gangster. A guy who owned bars and lent money but supposedly didn’t involve himself with drugs or violence, the line between businessman and criminal being perhaps a bit blurrier there than here. Perhaps. Anyway, we visited together, and I fell in love with the place. It was like the dream where you don’t know if it’s the future or the past: Streets full of thousands of scooters, and everyone in those facemasks and helmets. Alleys crammed with stands selling dumplings and papaya milk and candied tomatoes. Girls with umbrellas hiding from the sun. Old men in pajamas chewing bing-lang and spitting red juice. Sweet teenagers on dates lining up for tripe.
It was ghost month. The day we arrived, the news showed the opening of the gates to hell. People put out offerings of incense and flowers for their ancestors, but also instant ramen noodles and Oreos and Cokes. They came out of office buildings with bundles of ghost money, red and gold, and set it on fire in the street. We took afternoon naps while it poured and wore things that I at least would never wear at home: red robes, sleeveless undershirts, slippers in the street. At dinner, blindly, we felt for each other beneath the table. We raced back to our tiny rooftop room, with the laundry dripping from the one barred window and neon fish swimming through the drowned streets below. Dressed like a princess in imitation silk, hair pinned high with lacquered sticks, she stepped out into the hall and then reentered our room, where I lay in the dark, pretending to be one of her clients, waving a fat wad of New Taiwan dollars and waiting for the robe to fall.