by Reif Larsen
“Krook.”
“Yes, Krook. That always bothered me. I mean, it’s so careless to make a character disappear like that. Either he wants us to know that it’s just a novel and he’s in total control or he just wants to annoy us for caring.”
The doctor smiled. “As a man of science, of course, I would find it highly unlikely that a person could simply combust into thin air without provocation . . . and yet . . .” He paused, thinking. “The distance between the world within the book and our own world must be exactly right—it cannot be too near or too far. That distance is what I savor: Krook combusts. We see him combust, and his combustion gives me courage. I can walk around it. I can run my hands beneath it. The combustion is here, and I am there. Do you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” she said, though she knew exactly what he meant.
He nodded. “If I show you something, will you promise not to laugh?”
“Well, I can try,” she said. “I can’t promise. I tend to do the opposite of what I’m told.”
He bent down and retrieved a typewriter from beneath his desk. Then a tall stack of paper covered in print. Finally, a thick burgundy book. A flicker of the familiar ran through Charlene. He slid the stack of pages over to her.
“I haven’t shown this to anyone before,” he said. “Not even my wife.”
She read the first line aloud: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
She looked up. “Anna Karenina.”
“The greatest novel ever written,” he said. “Okay—we can debate it.”
“No,” she said. “I agree.”
“Well, then. We don’t have to debate.”
She glanced through the stack of pages. It was the entire novel. Typed out, word for word.
“What is this?” she said. How had he known? This book, of all books.
“It’s a little crazy, I admit, but I suppose I wanted to see what would happen to that distance if I wrote the book myself.”
“You’ve retyped the whole thing?”
“Oh, no. It isn’t finished,” he said. “I’m a slow typer.”
She stared at the pages. She could see places where he had whited out his mistakes. The words bent and swayed in her vision. She had read these words so many times before, but she had never seen them like this. Now they felt entirely alive, ready to jump off the page and fight her with their kinetic energy. She flipped to the last page. The story cut off in midsentence. Why had he not bothered to even finish the sentence? She touched the spot where the words ended, rubbing the paper, as if she could invoke whatever comes next.
“I probably shouldn’t have shown you this,” he said quickly.
“No—” she said, but he was already reaching for the pages. Their fingertips brushed against one another. A shot ran through her arm.
“Are you all right?” he said.
“I don’t know.” She suddenly felt ill.
“You don’t look well.”
He came around the desk and took her wrist in his hand. Two fingers pressed at her pulse. There was certainty in that touch, manifested from a lifetime of expertise. He was counting in his head. The skin where he was touching her felt as if it were burning. She let him lift her chin. He shined a light into her eyes. Her head swam. Something stirred between her legs.
He was old enough to be her father. Older. And yet . . .
“I’m fine,” she said, pushing him away. “Really, I’m fine.”
She was in such a state that she did not remember the rest of their visit, but as she was leaving with Radar in her arms, still caught in a murky farrago of desire, the doctor put a hand on her shoulder. Again, that heat. Her pulse, beating.
“One more thing,” he said.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to need a quart of your husband’s blood.”
“A quart?” she said.
“I assure you, it’s nothing personal. We simply must look at every possibility.”
• • •
BACK HOME in their apartment, for the first time in more than three years, she stared at the jumble of books on her shelves. She wiped a layer of dust from her abandoned copy of Anna Karenina. It was the 1965 Modern Library hardcover edition. A copper stain like a half moon along the fore edge. She opened the book and read the first few lines, smelling the faint tendrils of mildew trapped within its spine, but she felt none of the same electricity that the doctor’s facsimile had elicited in her. She slid the book back into its empty slot and scanned the rows of forgotten titles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Ada, or Ardor. Hopscotch. Why had she deserted them so completely? These books, once her lifeblood, had become a graveyard. She could not blame the books for everything that had gone wrong. The books were a smoke screen. The books gave only what they got.
She stood a moment more in front of the bookshelf, then she retrieved the copy of Anna Karenina again. She found her old typewriter beneath the bed, rolled a fresh page into the platen, and began to type.
• • •
WHEN ASKED, CHARLENE had always explained away her life as a series of false starts that finally had disqualified her from running the race. It was a convenient shorthand metaphor, though, like all metaphors, it was not quite true.
Since childhood, she had combated her low-grade neuroses with the infinite act of indexing. Unlike her older sister Vivienne, who had started dying her hair blond at thirteen and had safely married a Florida real estate mogul by the time she turned twenty-one, wiry, pale Charlene had grown up uncomfortable in her own skin, and yet she seemed to revel in this discomfort, no doubt due in part to a pervasive intellect that she had never quite been able to tame. At age nine, she began collecting obituaries from the New York Times, completely taken with the act of summarizing a life in only a couple hundred words. She collected classics of the genre—“Emilie Dionne, 20; Nun, Quintuplet”; “Marion Tinsley, 55; Checkers Champion Who Regularly Beat Men”—and then began to pen her own for (still living) neighbors, friends, and family.
“My little deaths,” she called them. “Mes petites morts.” (She had just started taking French, though she did not pick up on the sexual overtones of her declaration.) Such a morbid fascination had elicited a worried burst of letters from her teacher, until it was determined that this, like everything else, must be just a phase.
Charlene was a voracious, practically manic reader, and her bedroom in the attic had quickly filled with books that threatened to overrun the house. Her mother, Louise, the grammar instructor, recognized the imminent bibliographic chaos brewing above their heads. She warned her younger daughter about the dangers of disorder:
“When you can’t find something,” she said, “it may as well not exist.”
This pronouncement struck an elemental chord in young Charlene. She felt a great panic welling up just beyond the boundaries of her consciousness, so she asked her father to help her build floor-to-ceiling shelves in her bedroom. Charlene then took up organizing all of her books alphabetically by the author’s last name, an incredibly satisfying task that made her fingertips tingle with anticipation of the distinct order she was carving out of nothing. Except that when she was finished, the allure of such an index was swiftly overshadowed by the consequent hollowness of the system: the author’s name was divorced from what was actually taking place in the books themselves. The Age of Innocence, for instance, written by Wharton, E., was marooned on the very bottom shelf, which did not seem right at all. She set about discovering a new method of intimate organization that came as close as possible to mirroring the peaks and valleys of her own mind. In fact, she was chasing that same first tingle in the fingertips, a sensation she would never be able to quite replicate. Still, she searched. Painstakingly, over a period of months, she arranged and then rearranged the books using increasingly obscure criteria: first it was alphabetically by subject, the
n by character, then according to a much more mystical system based on how important each book was to her, a scheme that inevitably shifted daily and required constant tending. She even made a card catalog system for her collection of books and periodicals and created a ledger book with checkout slips for lending. Her mother offered to give her an old date stamper from school, but she refused, instead deciding to steal one from their local public library. It was by far the worst thing she had ever done, but it made her own library feel bona fide, legitimated by an act of petty larceny. When it was finally all ready to go, she put posters up at school touting the grand opening of the Volmer Collection Privée. This was what she called it, thinking herself quite grown up for knowing a French word like privée. On Saturday, she set up a desk by her bedroom door and waited for the people to come explore her vast, perfectly organized collection privée.
But no one came. No one sought her advice for irresistible summer reads, for books that could change your life, for books that could make you cry, but in the way that we love to cry. No one came, least of all her sister, who viewed reading as a deplorable habit, akin to picking one’s nose. That afternoon, her mother ascended the stairs with a plate of chocolate chip cookies and checked out The Phantom Tollbooth, though Charlene could tell she was not going to read the book and was just doing it so that the ledger book would not stand empty.
“Where did you get this stamp?” Louise asked as Charlene checked her out.
“Your book is due in two weeks,” Charlene said, imprinting the card with great violence.
That evening, as she lay in bed reading The Scarlet Letter, Charlene realized she was relieved that the masses hadn’t come to pilfer her shelves. Society was the only threat to the sanctity of selfhood: an unpatroned library was an orderly library. Thereafter, lending privileges were suspended for everyone except herself, which was probably a good thing, for her methods of organizing the books continued to change until it was impossible for anyone except Charlene to find the book they might be looking for. Even she struggled with the logic of the system: somewhere in her library she lost her copy of The Scarlet Letter and never managed to find it again.
She would graduate summa cum laude from Douglass College in 1966, with a B.A. in English, one of the last all-female classes before the college merged with Rutgers. Instead of listening to her conscience and pursuing a professional life of books, she had decided to test her luck in the big city, selling high-end women’s footwear and perfume in a spotless, cathedral-ceilinged department store on Madison Avenue. It was not a good match. It didn’t take her long to realize that success at the job was dependent not on sophistication or her instinctual prowess for predicting trends in the sociocultural zeitgeist but rather on wearing the right kitten heel pumps so as to encourage sexual harassment from the boss. Charlene quit her job—dramatically, fittingly—by throwing a rare bottle of Diorissimo across the store, its shattered remains filling the room with the intense velveteen wash of lily of the valley.
She lived, practically for free, in a grimy fourth-floor walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen, with two twin Dadaist painters named Lila and Vespers. The twins slept all day in the same bed and, from what she could tell, were locked in some kind of ménage à trois with the same man. Their art, which they worked on in tandem, involved pasting found objects—scissors, thimbles, shoelaces—onto a canvas, painting these objects white and then creating false labels for each item. “Scissors” became “meatloaf,” and so on. Charlene was not impressed.
Lila and Vespers also frequently enjoyed “expanding their horizons,” as they termed it. Before she met them, Charlene had never even seen a drug. She had drunk in college now and then, but cautiously, for she had never enjoyed relinquishing control, and she sensed her possession of the same gene that had left her aunt in a vodka-fueled stupor in western Pennsylvania. The gene was almost certainly present in her sister Vivienne, as evidenced by her daily succession of postmeridian double martinis.
One evening, Charlene reluctantly tagged along with Lila and Vespers to a party in a Lower East Side basement. The theme was “The Future.” The twins wrapped themselves in tinfoil. Charlene went costumeless. At some point Lila or Vespers—it did not matter which—handed her a tab of acid, which she surprised herself by considering for only the briefest of instants before popping into her mouth. Later that night, on the Brooklyn Bridge, she also tried her first quaalude, or what a man in a mustache said was a quaalude. The night was transcendent, but not because of the drugs—she felt as if she had shed a skin, as if anything was possible now.
As she did with everything, Charlene became very obsessed with getting high. It turned into a game, and then it turned into more than a game. Her parents had reluctantly agreed to supply her with a small monthly allowance until she got “her feet back on the ground.” She returned this favor by spending their money on cheap Spanish wine and various barbiturates and psychedelics, which Lila and Vespers initially supplied her and which she eventually supplied herself via their contact, a boorish fisherman named Vlada, who most likely was not a fisherman at all. She met people at the parties. Those parties. At first she went with the twins and then she went alone. It was just that if you dipped into it, you were utterly consumed. You couldn’t go halfway. Charlene felt that she was a part of something very important, something utterly new. This was New York. This was 1967. As the rest of America continued to button its top button, she howled into the night with artists and beboppers and hippies, tripping down the Bowery, high as a kite, debating the ideas of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt with anyone who cared to listen. She fell in love. She fell out of love. There were a number of men. There were a number of men with mustaches. There was even one woman. And it was this woman who introduced Charlene to Hazel, which is what she called heroin. In retrospect, this was a horrifically innocent moniker. Charlene had always been terrified of needles, but when she felt the drop for the first time, the warmth that erased inside from out, the seven thousand hands upon her, she realized she had found exactly what she was looking for.
It was wonderful. It was wonderful and wonderful and wonderful, until it wasn’t wonderful anymore. She quickly burned through her allowance. She sold all of her books to the Strand Bookstore save two—A Tale of Two Cities and a recently purchased copy of Anna Karenina upon which she had spilled lukewarm tea. The trouble was that even the drugs did not fully extinguish her systemic neuroses, her tingling desire for order. Each morning, she would choose which way to sequence the pair of books. There were only two options, two dichotomous takes on the world. She rearranged them nonetheless. Each was plausible, but not quite true: Did the city make the woman or did the woman make the city?
Beyond the confines of that shelf, however, the city itself could not be ordered. The tines of disarray would put her to bed each night, gnawing at the recesses of her mind as she lay there sleepless, and they would greet her each morning when she awoke with a splitting headache to the idling motors of graffitied delivery trucks or the wail of police sirens. Soon the drugs were all there was. Every moment in her day was organized around either acquiring them, taking them, or recovering from their effects. Her body was not so much hers as a vehicle that she occasionally tended. Even the twins, who were some of the most unobservant people she knew, began to remark upon her descent.
In November, after vomiting for the fifth morning in a row and fearing some permanent damage, Charlene finally dragged herself to a hospital. The doctor performed some tests and told her she was suffering from a most common condition: she was pregnant.
“What do you mean, pregnant?” she said.
“Do you want me to draw you a diagram?” he said.
As she was leaving, he looked up from his desk. “If I may,” he said. “You’re now responsible for two people. Everything you put into you, you are also putting into your baby.”
Charlene sat in the kitchen with the twins and the malnourished creeper p
lant, trying to imagine a theoretical child with each of her ghostly mustached lovers, an exercise that caused her to start hyperventilating.
“It’s no big deal,” said Lila. “We know someone who can fix it.”
“He’s creepy but cheap,” Vespers added. Vespers wore a faux-gypsy rhinestone headband, even while sleeping. It was a convenient clue for telling the two apart.
Lila handed Charlene the number, scrawled on the back of a prescription bottle. “Don’t worry, ShaLa, we’ve both used him,” she said. Charlene had no idea where their nickname for her had come from. They were the kind of people who gave nicknames to mark their territory.
From her lineup of potential progenitors—a shady group whose membership grew the more she thought about the extent of her nocturnal encounters—Charlene could not help but gravitate to one man, hoping against hope that it was he who was the father. His name was T. K.—short for what? She couldn’t remember anymore, or maybe she had never known. T. K., the black boy from St. Paul, Minnesota, with the warm eyes and the learned prairie laugh, no doubt picked up from one of his white foster parents. Mere months after V-J Day, buoyed by the promise of a new era, they had adopted T. K. after hearing his story on the radio: his birth family had perished in a downtown slum fire, and he had survived the blaze by being hurled to safety out of a fourth-story window into the arms of a firefighter. He was six months old.
At least this is what T. K. told Charlene during one of their precious nights together, lying naked in her bed, ankles touching, the twins arguing loudly about Gauguin in the next room. Charlene had imagined his little Minnesotan family—T. K. and his progressive white parents, dressed in down parkas, surrounded by mounds and mounds of snow. He had been first in his class at Humboldt High. Full scholarship to Macalester College. He was one of the smartest people she had ever met, and yet quite clearly sheltered to a fault, for he had been raised on Schubert and Robert Louis Stevenson, had never owned a television, and had never even been out of the state before he left on a bus for Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, smack in the middle of Washington Heights.