Oliver didn’t know what to say to this, so he stuffed a tater tot in his mouth and didn’t say anything. They were legitimately cold now. He wondered if they were going to order actual dinner before they ran out of things to talk about.
“Look,” Wilson said. “As long as you’re writing it, it’s going to be something original. Don’t get all swell headed, because I could say that to anybody. Every one of us is an individual creating something unique that only we could create, and blah blah blah. You get what I’m saying. So if you finish these stories you probably will find a way to make them different, if that’s what you want. But you’ll still be using someone else’s paintbrush. I’d like to see what happens if you start from scratch.”
“All right. So what’s my first assignment?”
“Excellent. Your first… oh wait, Pallas.”
What?”
“That was the other thing I promised not to forget. Minerva is insisting you join us.”
“I know; she’s made that really clear a couple of times.”
“Well now she’s looped me into this, so if you don’t attend we’re both going to be in trouble. I’ll give you plenty of advance notice, all right? We’re going on the last Saturday of the month. Be at our apartment by 4 PM and we’ll take it from there. And no, you do not have a choice. Blow her off at your peril, because her next step is going to be to find out where you live and drag you out the door.”
“That sounds terrible. Why is she so insistent?”
“I think she wants to adopt you. Don’t ask me why, and don’t say no.”
“All right, fine.”
“Excellent. Now let’s get some real food, these potato things are dreadful.”
Dinner devolved into small talk about nothing in particular, and also a little about Wilson’s super-secret writing project. A very little. What Oliver learned was that Wilson was writing something “stupidly ambitious” and “never-before-attempted” and that he expected to fail miserably. He’d only written one chapter so far, but it felt like more because he’d written it seventeen times.
Oliver wanted to talk more about Minerva, but worried that expressing too much interest might be construed (correctly) as inappropriately obsessive.
When the meal was done—he paid without asking, and it wasn’t as awkward as Oliver thought it was going to be—Wilson handed out the new writing assignment.
“Write something personal,” Wilson said.
“That’s all?”
“Sure.”
“Personal, but fictional?”
“Yes, stick to fiction. Maybe first person, if you feel up to it. You haven’t done that yet.”
“It’s a little vague.”
Wilson sighed, as if to say something personal was an incredibly precise instruction as far as he was concerned.
“All right. Stick to a small story. One person meets another person in a place. Describe the people and the place, have them interact, and then get out. No aliens, or ghosts, or dragons. Just two people having a conversation in a place.”
“That really sounds boring.”
“Maybe it will be. See what happens.”
“All right. Oh, can you give me a letter?”
“A letter? That’s really a gimmick for the… yes, all right. Um, E. The letter E.”
Then they shook on it, and Oliver pushed his way out.
The crowd at Four Horse had only gotten worse over the course of the meal, with overflow from the bar filling up all the standing space inside, until it seemed as if people were actively looming over them as they ate, in anticipation of a table clearing out. Oliver had a burger made by someone overly fond of sriracha, which he somewhat regretted. Still, it was a free meal, and those were hard to complain about.
Once on the street, Oliver oriented himself and headed down the road. He wasn’t too far from a subway station, but using the subway to get home from this spot just seemed lazy: it was only three stops, it was a decently warm night, and the walk was only a couple of miles. Also, he could save on train fare, and maybe work out a plot before he got home.
To end up going in the proper direction, he had to navigate the modest college pedestrian detritus littering the sidewalk for three blocks until he reached Common Ave and hung a right. It was exactly the kind of stretch of city that Oliver hated, because for the most part these kids—he called them kids even though they were only a couple of years younger than him—hardly ever looked where they were going even when they were sober. Here, most of them were not.
At one point, he had to step all the way to his left to avoid a phalanx of undergrads who thought it necessary to walk four abreast, and if that weren’t bad enough, the one on the end did all his talking with his arms. Oliver nearly got struck in the face by an act of over-exuberant gesticulation, while the kid responsible for this near-collision didn’t even notice.
Oliver’s aggressive sidestepping, in turn, nearly resulted in a different collision with another person. The large man, just coming out of another bar, came to a stop just before he ran Oliver down.
“Careful,” the man said, in a deep baritone.
“Sorry!” Oliver said, quickly getting out of the man’s way and continuing along the sidewalk.
It wasn’t until Oliver reached the next street that he realized the man he nearly ran into was the same one he saw lingering at the coffee shop before. He was the one who spoke to Minerva.
Also, he was following Oliver.
That couldn’t have been right. It was a big, busy thoroughfare, with lots of people moving in both directions, so undoubtedly the guy was just heading the same way Oliver was, as were many other people.
Except none of those other people paced Oliver quite so exactly as the large man. Ollie kept looking over his shoulder to confirm that it was all in his mind, but instead, every time he checked he became more convinced that he was being stalked.
He got to a busy intersection just as the walk light ended and raced across. The cars rushed through as soon as he reached the curb. He turned back.
The large man was standing on the other curb, unable to go any further. That he was staring right at Oliver more or less cemented Ollie’s concerns.
“Hey!” Oliver shouted, over the traffic. “Can I help you, man?”
“Can’t,” the man shouted.
“Then leave me alone!”
“Can’t,” he repeated.
“What?”
“I understand you’re a sorcerer.”
“What did you say?”
“You heard.”
“Who told you to say that?”
It was a prank. It had to be. Maybe Wilson put him up to it. Or Minerva, who after all was seen talking to the guy. But it didn’t seem like something either of them would really do.
“You did,” the man said, smiling.
“You’re crazy! Leave me alone!”
“Can’t.”
The light changed, and the man started across the street. Oliver decided this was a good time to start running.
He didn’t stop until he reached his apartment.
Chapter Four
Eatery
Oliver didn’t get any writing in that night, or the night after. He spent both evenings and an unreasonable portion of the day in between staring out windows and over his shoulder, looking for the large man.
He never saw him. He wasn’t sure whether that was better or worse, because it raised the possibility the man was never there in the first place.
To walk himself back from that conclusion, Oliver pointed out—to his reflection, in the bathroom, which was when he found he was the most reasonable—that the man wasn’t dressed in animal furs and carrying a massive broadsword like the character described in his story. He was dressed as one might expect of an individual who drove large trucks for a living: in heavy boots, coveralls, and a brown leather bomber jacket. Although he did have a thick, tangled beard, and he was unreasonably large as human beings went.
Maybe the
most disturbing thing was how the man answered questions. Can’t, he said. Was he saying he “cannot” or was he identifying himself? Did the man think his name was Cant?
Of course he didn’t; that was ridiculous. The entire thing was, actually, so Oliver decided he’d just gotten it wrong. The encounter with ‘Cant’ was some combination of Oliver being more tired (or non-sober) than he realized, coupled with an actual run-in with a person, where things went a little differently than he remembered. That was all.
Maybe the guy was speaking another language or something, and Oliver just misheard some words. That was probably it.
The third day was the day of TAWU, and even though his Hockspit story wasn’t getting presented, there were other stories to talk about and so Oliver attended. It ended up being the day Ivor presented an original piece for only the second time.
Oliver had read it on his phone on the train, on the way to the meeting. It wasn’t a long story, and it was kind of a mess. Ivor had a penchant for unreasonably long paragraphs and liked to use dialogue to have characters deliver exposition in deeply awkward ways, by saying things nobody would ever say. When he got to the sentence, Bob, as you know we need the reactor to power the lattice uninterruptedly or face catastrophic consequences of epic proportion that could trap someone inside for ever, Oliver had to stop reading for a while and ask what he did to deserve this.
The story’s idea was pretty good, if a little borrowed. The execution was terrible, though.
He decided the criticisms running through his head were starting to make him sound like Wilson, and he thought that was probably a bad thing, so when it came time, he didn’t offer much of a thorough critique to Ivor. Wilson was also pretty gentle, and nobody had much else to say that particularly critical.
Oliver was beginning to wonder if groups like this could actually make a writer like Ivor any better. But he decided to put that thought aside and deal with it another time.
Minerva cornered him before the meeting ended.
“So you’re on this time,” she said, without preamble.
“Yes.”
“You promise?”
They were in the kitchen again. The meeting had already broken up, but when Ollie tried to sneak out with the rest of the group, Minnie was ready to grab him by the elbow and hang on.
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” he said. “Clubs really aren’t my thing.”
“I promise you’ll enjoy it. And this isn’t like any other club.”
“How’s that?”
Ollie could barely tolerate a crowd like the one at Four Horse; he had no idea how he was going to survive an actual nightclub. In his lifetime, he’d been to three, and each of them was—by acclaim—the Best Thing Ever. As far as he could tell there was no difference between them though: loud house music with heavy bass; disorienting flashing lights; a small collection of attractive people evenly scattered in a crowd of people wearing poor-fitting clothing that didn’t flatter them at all.
He didn’t enjoy clubs, and never expected to. Although he was, by instinct, pretty introverted, so this wasn’t a big surprise.
“It’s hard to describe,” she said. “It’s a different theme, all the time.”
“All right.”
She laughed, and threw a cheese puff at his head. He would analyze this later to discern precisely how flirty it was, but in the moment the thought didn’t come to him at all.
“Look, I know going out isn’t your thing, but I can fix that.”
“I guess that’s something I can look forward to. Being fixed.”
She threw another cheese puff.
It was such a positive encounter—retrospectively—that Oliver didn’t even remember to check over his shoulder for the guy who might or might not be Cant. He did decide that the next time he had a conversation with Minnie, he’d ask her about the man, given Ollie had seen her interact with him. It was incredibly likely she wouldn’t know what Oliver was talking about, but it was worth asking anyway, so long as he could figure out a way to ask without sounding nuts.
He spent the rest of his ride concentrating on Wilson’s insistence that Ollie try something personal. It was a weird assignment. What did it mean to write something personal, yet fictitious? He got the sense that this wasn’t about penning a roman a clef of any kind. This was more basic. Something small.
She sat in the booth of the eatery, this old woman he hardly knew. She was pale in every meaningful sense, with white skin that sagged and drooped over a skeletal system that didn’t look fully up to the task of supporting the weight of her flesh. Her eyes, which he remembered as being a vibrant blue, had faded somehow, like a portion of cloth upholstery left under a sunlit window for too many years. Cloudy, but still alive, those eyes darted from object to object. No part of the diner was safe from her discerning gaze.
Her hair had thinned sufficiently such that each long, silky white strand claimed a large portion of her scalp. It reminded him of when he tore the hair off Karen’s Barbie doll, leaving behind only the follicle pinholes, except Barbie’s follicles spawned multiple strings of plastic platinum hair. The old woman’s skull only managed one string per pinhole.
Even her blouse was pale: a simple frock that appeared too large and hung loosely from her shoulders. It was frayed along the seams, and there was historical evidence of a coffee stain at the midway point of the right breast, a spot that had no doubt been treated to an incredible amount of personal attention by the blouse’s owner. Her fastidiousness had given way to practicality with time, and the fight between those two instincts could be seen in every millimeter of the stain.
The next battle in that war of the blouse would be fought over the loose thread on the left-hand sleeve. It was early evidence of the gradual unspooling of the entire thing, a vanguard of entropy rubbing against the Formica countertop as she ran her fingers along the handle of the spoon.
He wondered what would happen if he pulled on the string. Would the entire blouse come apart? Then his mind went to a more unsavory place and he wondered what would happen if he pulled on one of her few remaining hairs. Would she end up bald, like Karen’s long-buried Barbie doll? Or would she simply unspool before his eyes? He imagined that hair was the one consistent piece of internal connective tissue keeping her together, woven in with her synapses and bones and cartilage, tracing the path of her capillaries and on down to her closed-until-further-notice womb and on to her overworked knees and the disasters that were her feet. Would she become a pile of disarticulated matter with one sharp tug? Nothing left of her but the memories of the fully assembled?
Is this how we all end?
He shook the thought loose like a dog out of the rain, and turned his attention to the cup of tea slowly cooling in his hands, as she tried to speak.
“Thank you,” she said.
There was iron in her voice, still. It hadn’t betrayed her like the rest of her body had done. He noticed her teeth were stained with the same coffee damage that had claimed part of her blouse, and wondered if she spent as much time trying to whiten them as with the blouse. For someone so defined by shades of ivory, it must have been maddening that the one part of her body meant to be white adamantly refused to commit to anything better than a brownish yellow.
“You’re welcome,” he said, which was a lie. You’re welcome and no problem and no worries and all the other things one said in response, they were all just there to let the person giving thanks off the hook. He didn’t want to be there and he didn’t want her thanks, and it was a problem, he had worries and she was not welcome. He didn’t want her let off the hook.
But this is what we do, isn’t it? he thought. We take care of the things we have to take care of because there isn’t anyone else to do that.
There was, for years, someone to do these things he was now going to have to be doing, because Karen wasn’t there any more to do them. Karen was lying in a hole in a field on top of a hill surrounded by a heavily manicured lawn, beneath freshly upturned
soil and a layer of grass seed. By the end of the summer, that seed would be sprouting new blades of grass to erase all evidence of the turned-up soil marking the hole in the field on the hill, and there would cease to be proof of Karen in the world. Karen’s entire self gone, like the words on a chalkboard.
All except for the stone.
We’ve traded in my sister for a slab of limestone with her name on it.
It was not at all a fair trade, but death had a no-returns policy that was impossible to get around.
A slab of limestone couldn’t do the things Karen could. Admittedly, he never spent a lot of time talking to Karen when she was more than a name carved out by a chisel, when she was still chalk on that blackboard. He wished he’d gotten around to doing more with her before her cosmic eraser was clapped. This is a sentiment everyone had, regarding the dead, and he recognized this abstractly, a vague awareness that what he was experiencing for the first time in this moment was a universal thing. He also appreciated that this particular kind of mourning was for conversations never had, and that made it deeply selfish. He was sad for the loss of his own hypothetical future enrichment. Not for Karen, but for how Karen’s interaction with him might create a better version of himself.
This version also mourned the loss of what Karen did, for no matter how expensive and nattily carved that limestone slab might be, it couldn’t do what he relied on Karen to do. It couldn’t take care of mother.
Neither could he, and that was the problem. But as much as he couldn’t, he had to, because there wasn’t anyone else left to do it now.
“I kept your room,” she said.
The waitress took this opportunity to intercede on behalf of their appetites, which they had been ignoring for the past several minutes while they drank their hot things.
She was attractive in the way waitresses could sometimes be attractive, meaning it was some byproduct of her interest in looking basically appealing to the general public, and the lowered standards that result in being the only twenty-something girl in a busy diner. She might look plain in another room, or a larger town, or a city in a different state. In the quiet diner, slinging java and eggs and unmeasured quantities of grease, she was pretty, or nearly so.
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