It was interesting, or rather it had been interesting, the first five or six times the debate came up. But after a year, he doubted he was going to hear anything different than the other times, so he elected not to participate actively.
He also wasn’t sure he should participate actively.
Presenting his own writing was a weird experience. After all the time he’d spent in the group, listening to other people’s stuff and actively engaging them on what they’d just read, he now felt as if he had a duty to be silent and wait for opinions to form. Or for a decision to be reached. Like he was listening to his parents argue about something he’d done, while he was still in the room: surely, the punishment would be agreed upon shortly.
Oliver was only half-listening, then, when he made eye contact with the other person in the apartment not directly engaged. Her name was Minerva. She was Wilson’s live-in girlfriend-slash-something-something-fiancé. Everyone called her Minnie except for her boyfriend, and her parents, probably.
Wilson was the sort of person to favor full names in all circumstances. As Oliver had a rather long name—his last name was Naughton, but due to some complicated family dynamics he had two middle names—he was glad Wilson’s preference didn’t go beyond surnames, or they’d never get anything done.
Minnie was a petite, auburn-haired, adorable woman with turquoise eyes and about fifteen different versions of a smile. Each one was devastating. There were times when Oliver thought she had to be invented by someone, as he didn’t think it was possible for the natural world to produce her without some kind of guided supervision.
There was, he reflected, a pretty decent chance he was in love with her. This wasn’t necessarily extraordinary, as he couldn’t imagine a world in which everyone didn’t also feel this way. It fit in perfectly well with all the other known facts about the universe: the sun rises; the sky is blue; everyone is in love with Minerva.
She was standing at the edge of the kitchen, a bystander to the TAWU meeting, as always. Very, very occasionally, she would interject an observation, but it always felt like a protest vote sort of circumstance. She wasn’t a writer, and more precisely, she had no interest in becoming one. (If one were to measure the identification of a person as “a writer” with the minimum standard of “writing things”, one third of the regulars in the writers’ underground weren’t writers at all. Until recently, Oliver would have been one of them.) Sometimes, Minerva sat quietly at the far end of the room, and maybe once or twice brought in cookies. On certain occasions, she wasn’t even in the apartment. Those were the bad weeks.
Minnie gave him a little head gesture, which he interpreted to mean, come over here, and so he did. This in no way interfered with the debate.
Once he got close enough, she took his elbow and pulled him into the kitchen.
“It’s really good,” she said.
“It’s…”
He lost his train of thought. She did that to him.
“The Kingdom. It’s really good. Wilson thinks so too.”
“Are you sure? He’s trying to talk me into writing something else instead.”
“That just means he thinks you’re worth rescuing.”
“Rescuing? Like a puppy?”
“Yes, like a puppy.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Then you aren’t paying attention, except I know you are. C’mon, Ollie, he props up the bad ones and tears down the good ones.”
He had noticed this, but this observation led him in the direction of thinking unkind things about his ostensible mentor, so he dismissed it. Hearing it presented so baldly by someone he would have expected to be on Wilson’s side was a little jarring.
“Why does he do that?” he asked.
“The good ones need to be challenged to get better. The bad ones need encouragement just to become good. I mean, that’s what I think. He could just be out to destroy the good ones.”
Oliver laughed, because he wanted to think she was kidding. She hadn’t delivered one of her fifteen known smiles with the line, though, so he couldn’t be sure.
“Listen, you should get back in there,” Minnie said.
“Yeah, probably.”
“Oh, and what are you doing later?”
“What?”
This was the longest private conversation he’d ever had with Minerva and his head was exploding. He thought he was out, and then she asked the most terrifying open-ended question she could have asked that didn’t involve an explicit sex act.
“Tonight,” she repeated. “A bunch of us are going to that new club. You’re invited if you wanna come.”
“Thanks, okay, sure. No, I mean. No, can’t. I have to work.”
“Aw, too bad. Next time?”
“Sure, next time.”
The debate ended to the complete satisfaction of nobody as usual, and then came the final part of the meeting: the critique circle.
Oliver had already managed to detach himself from the current reality to some degree, in that he was no longer in the moment so much as he was sitting outside of it and watching dispassionately.
Practiced disengagement was more or less his default mode. In it, he managed to be involved but at the same time listening to a running meta-commentary in his head. It was like having his own narrator accompany him through life. About the only times he could remember being fully engaged was when he was talking to Minnie, and when he was writing.
The critique circle was pretty painless, because everyone there had certain predilections, which led to similar-sounding criticisms, which fit pretty much anything placed in front of them.
Take Ivor. He had a lot to say about the title. In the two or three minutes in which he had the floor at least half was taken up by this. On the occasions when the piece being critiqued had no title, he’d talk for twice as long, specifically to crowdsource a title for the author.
Jennifer took a similar approach, only she had a habit of finding one particular word—not the title, since that was taken—and talking at length about how striking the word choice was and why it worked.
Then there was Tandy and her Big Themes and Gerald’s fascination with alliterative passages, and Danny’s love of dialogue. And so on.
Oliver didn’t know any of these people outside of this particular space. They didn’t do anything socially together—or if they did, it was without him—and there was never any time to discuss their lives above and beyond fiction writing. Because of this, Oliver, in self-narrative mode, had been providing them with their own backstories.
Ivor, in his late thirties, was chubby and unshaven. He had a job during the week, which required him to shave daily, so when Saturday came around he treated himself by not doing it. Ivor was unreasonably preoccupied with how much things cost. He carried a real estate property values spreadsheet around in his head, and could tell you how much it cost to buy a condo in any part of the county. He was also single, not currently dating anyone, and liked to blame women—as a monolithic whole—for the fact that he was unable to find love.
Aside from the physical observations—the man was indeed chubby and unshaven—everything else was either deduced observationally by Oliver or invented whole cloth. Oliver no longer knew where the line was between reality and something he made up. Since he doubted the day would come when he got to know Ivor well enough to figure out where that line was, he didn’t much care.
Tandy was probably a lesbian. She had a habit of staring overlong at Minerva when Minnie was in the room, which Oliver only noticed because he had the same habit. She was a copy editor for one of the five or six literary magazines that hadn’t gone out of business yet thanks to the Internet. This either made her a stickler for textual precision and clarity—and a complete lunatic about semicolons—or those innate tendencies were what led her to copy editing. Tandy liked to wear sandals in all but the worst weather, along with lots of brown clothing, and carried pinecone-and-allspice potpourri in one of the pockets of her jacket.
These were
the most thorough backstories Oliver had, because Tandy and Ivor had been there as long as he had. Others were just initial impressions written out into longer sentences. Gerald, for instance, spent too much time gaming online, but had a girlfriend who also spent too much time gaming online, so she was a good match. Nathan was in his early twenties and was attending community college part-time. Ollie didn’t have a profession for him yet, but it was something that required clean fingernails.
Most of the rest of them were represented largely by mental index cards with two or three words on them, and a lot of the time those words weren’t even going to make it to the final draft. Like Bibi, who’d only been to three meetings. Her card said “boobs”, because so far that was all Oliver had noticed about her. Undoubtedly, the longer she participated, the more likely it was his eyes would drift northward—to focus on what she was saying—and east and west to review other physical characteristics which may come in handy when he got around to building out her imaginary life. Until then, “boobs” was it.
Interestingly, he had almost no backstory for the two people he was most likely to have real facts on: Wilson and Minnie. For Wilson, what he had was the hagiographic edition, which was surprisingly short on real details. As for Minnie, Oliver didn’t want to ruin her by inventing a life outside of the condo that was anything less than amazing.
The bullet-point version of the critique circle, on the subject of the quality of The Kingdom, was:
Dialogue: good
Magic: okay
Some wanted less limited and more explicit magic, which led to a new lengthy discussion on the merits of placing artificial limitations on what Wilson called “the ultimate get out of trouble free card”
Some wanted no magic at all
Characters: okay
Ivor ended his dissection of the “kingdom” in the title to talk about how the main character’s name began with the same letter as Oliver’s name, which he seemed to think was important but couldn’t explain why
Several complained that it was confusing to name a character “Cant” and wanted to know why he did that, and he didn’t know
Dragons: bad
This was just Wilson, who apparently hated dragons without cause
Conclusion: do something else
In spite of all the back-and-forth regarding the merits of the fantasy genre (specifically the ‘sword-and-sandal’ variety) the group tended to follow Wilson’s lead: The Kingdom was good, but put it down and go write something different.
Then, Wilson ended the TAWU meeting with a new letter—P—and the group was adjourned.
Oliver didn’t stick around for any after-meeting conversation. He never did, which could have been why he had to invent everyone’s backstories. A couple of times, he became convinced that the others were meeting outside of Wilson’s condo, and Ollie simply wasn’t invited, but he always either talked himself out of this or convinced himself he didn’t care, depending on his mood.
Either way, he wasn’t along for socializing. Plus, he was about to be late for work.
The condo was conversationally identified as belonging to Wilson, but nobody in TAWU was actually sure if this was true. What was true was that it was on the top floor of a walk-up brownstone in the center of Tenth Avenue, which meant the place was worth a substantial amount more than it seemed either occupant was capable of owning. The owner—be they Wilson or Minnie—was either independently wealthy due to some sort of unusual windfall, or they came from a wealthy family that earned money via a more traditional long-term means.
Oliver liked to think the money was on Minerva’s side, but he wasn’t sure why he preferred that. Maybe, in his own backstory, he was secretly harboring a wish to steal her away from Wilson, and had a complex fantasy of them running off using her father’s credit card, making it all the way to a Caribbean island before daddy cut off the funds in a fit of pique, because he always liked Wilson’s family and wanted to punish his little girl for going against him. Then Oliver and Minerva would be forced to go native, live off the meager earnings of their menial jobs, share a cot in the back of a bar, and maybe later solve a murder mystery.
Maybe.
The condo was part of one building in a row of buildings that were attached to one another, all the way down the street to the end of the block. The same thing existed on the opposite side of the street, with the middle occupied by a grassy median that was called a vertical park. It had statuaries and fountains and ran all the way down the length of Tenth.
Oliver worked in a coffee shop two blocks away, on Market Street, a stretch of road that featured some of the most high-end shops in the country. Oliver couldn’t afford to buy anything on Market, except possibly the coffee, and only because he got an employee discount.
It was in the shop, a year earlier, where he’d seen the sign posted advertising an opening in the Tenth Avenue Writers’ Underground. He took it down almost as soon as it went up, because they had a strict policy about that sort of thing and also because he wanted to reduce the competition for this presumably coveted opening.
Wilson and Minnie didn’t know he worked there, and he liked that just fine. They lived in a world where top-floor condos on Tenth Ave were affordable things, and where they could just up and head to “that new club”—whatever that was—without having to budget ahead of time for a night out.
Oliver took the five cement steps down from the door of the brownstone to the street, and suffered a moment of disorientation. The high walls of the buildings created a kind of forced perspective, in which he felt even smaller, somehow, as if standing beside a mountain range instead of a seven-story walk-up.
At the far end of the street, around a flagpole, a flock of birds circled, on their way to settling at the high edge of the cornice, where there was probably a nest of some kind. The mountain range effect conspired with what he had to admit was probably an overactive imagination, and for a half-second he thought he wasn’t looking at nearby birds at all. He was looking at faraway dragons.
Write something new, he reminded himself.
He already had something in mind. It came to him as soon as Wilson handed out the assignment.
“P is for Phone,” Oliver said aloud, to nobody. Nobody responded.
Chapter Two
Phone
A fat drop of water clung to the white ceiling tile for an indescribably long period, before it surrendered to gravity and plummeted to the carpet. It made a gentle sound—POIT—as it added itself to the moisture already collected down there, on the floor of the Young Misses section, to the left of a rack of discount blouses and the right of more discount blouses.
It was a leak. It had been going on for hours.
Orrin stood there with the beam of the flashlight he only grudgingly employed, trained on the space above the damp carpeting, waiting for the next one to fall. Every drop of water caught the light on the way down, a tiny, brief flash. They could be tracer rounds—time to reload the gun—except they didn’t announce that the ceiling was about to run out of water. If anything, the next step was going to be an increase, possibly damaging the racks of discount blouses on both sides.
It’d rained all day, and now at three in the morning with the rain still going, Orrin had to think that what he was looking at was the first indication of something very bad rather than the final act of a minor inconvenience. If the roof above the ceiling had a leak, there was no telling how much water was pooled up there and how long it had been happening. The gradual darkening of the ceiling tile was a good sign, though, that a bigger mess was pending.
That was provided the tile was really darkening. It was hard to tell with the flashlight.
During the day, the sales floor of Mad Maggie’s Shop-O-Rama was a shadowless consumer mecca, a shining shopping plaza city on a hill, with industrial strength fluorescents to keep everyone awake and make the products look newer and cleaner and less flawed. But when the store closed, the main lights went away and the emergency lights kicked in
. These were small spotlights mounted in odd places throughout the store, pointed at weird angles and creating a chthonic nightmare of shadows in every direction.
The shadows weren’t so bad as long as one resisted the urge to eradicate them, such as by using a flashlight to get around.
Orrin kind of preferred the nighttime version of the place. All the light made him uncomfortable. Sure, it was probably because he was mostly only there after hours, which meant the cozy half-lit aisles he was accustomed to looked artificial and alien in full light. He was also a night person by nature and a loner by social standards. He was reasonably sure he was those things first, and therefore a good night watchman, but it was possible he became those things in order to be a better night watchman. It was hard to say.
He’d been doing the job for a little over two years, which officially made him—even counting the other shifts—the longest-running office-holder. The watchmen who came before him could have simply gotten better jobs, which was possible since it wasn’t a well-paying position, although there were worse ones out there. But Orrin didn’t think that was the case.
When Mad Maggie’s hired him he was told the job had high turnover. That tended to mean his predecessors quit or were fired, at a frequency atypical in the eyes of the hiring manager. He was pretty sure the reason was that the others used their flashlights.
That was the thing he figured out his first month: the extra light just made the darkness worse. Shine a beam in semi-darkness and it ruins your night vision and makes the shadows seem deeper and much more foreboding. Sometimes, it creates the illusion things out there are moving when they aren’t, and it’s hard to climb out of that psychological rabbit-hole once you’ve started going down it.
So he taught himself to see in the native dimness of the off-hour lighting, figured out where all the weird shadows were—the ones that looked like something to run away from all got their own names—and things had been just fine since.
Unfiction Page 4