by Ben Lerner
Around the time the synapsid opening evolved, I realized I had to pee. I asked Roberto if he had to go to the bathroom and he said no and darted off again. I would have to hold it; there was no way I was going to leave him unsupervised while I went, and I couldn’t imagine dragging him into the men’s room so I could piss. All over the world people were tending their children ingeniously in the midst of surpassing extremities, seeing them through tsunamis and civil wars, shielding them from American drones, but I was at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one’s bladder. I followed Roberto through the Hall of Mammals and their extinct relatives, taking another picture of the boy before the brontops, who most likely subsisted on a diet of soft leaves. I caught myself shifting my weight a little from foot to foot as the cell phone made its simulated click, something I did as a child when I had to go to the bathroom, and I had an involuntary memory of wetting myself at the Topeka Zoo at four, having refused to go when I had the chance, the humiliating warmth spreading down my leg, darkening my corduroys.
By the time we stood together before the great mammoth skeleton at the end of the vertebrate cladogram—the mummified remains of a baby woolly mammoth displayed in a case beside the pedestal—I had regressed so severely that it felt like a form of devolution. Roberto calmly if clumsily sketched the great curving tusks while I tried not to wet myself and longed for a guardian. Half the men walking around the fossils seemed to have a baby strapped to their chests and I tried to reassure myself by remembering that Alex, the sanest person I knew, believed I was genetically and practically competent to be a father, to perpetuate the species. But why, exactly, had she selected me? Because we were best friends, of course—because our relationship was more durable than any marriage we could imagine, because she thought I was smart and good. I had never really doubted myself enough to doubt her reasons, but now it occurred to me with the force of revelation: She wants you to donate the sperm precisely because she doesn’t think you’d ever get it together enough to be an active father; she’s much more afraid of raising a child with an onerous father than without a father at all; she comes from a line of self-sufficient women whose partners disappear. You appeal because you’ll be sweet and avuncular and financially supportive and someone she can talk to for emotional advice, but she assumes you’re too scattered and scared to intervene dramatically in the child’s early development and daily life. She doesn’t want to do it entirely alone, but she doesn’t want to do it with a full partner; you come from great stock—Alex loved my parents—and will never go totally AWOL, but you’re also sufficiently infantile and self-involved to cede all the substantial parenting to her. She chose you for your deficiencies, not in spite of them, a new kind of mating strategy for millennial women whose priority is keeping the more disastrous fathers away, not establishing a nuclear family.
“I have to go to the bathroom, Roberto. Why don’t you come with me?”
“I don’t have to go.”
“Come with me and wait for me.” I was shifting my weight back and forth again.
“I’ll wait for you here.”
“You are coming with me. Now.”
“But—”
“Do you want something from the gift shop or not?”
As we approached the restrooms I repeated to Roberto that if he was in the exact spot I left him in when I came back out he could have a gift of his choice. I tried to joke away my worry and enlist his compliance by making it a game: see if you can stand as still as a fossil. I parked him beside the drinking fountain and went into the restroom while he positioned himself in a dinosaur pose, and when I emerged tremendously relieved two and a half minutes later I found that he was gone. Terror seized me and I had to keep myself from running back toward the galleries. As soon as I turned the corner, he leapt out at me, shrieking like a velociraptor. Before it dissipated, the fear turned to fury, and I knelt down and gripped his shoulders and all my accumulated anxiety and self-loathing issued forth in a hiss: I am going to tell your mom you’ve misbehaved; you’re not getting anything from the gift shop.
Roberto, eyes lowered, said he was just joking and hadn’t gone far and hadn’t done anything wrong. As my fury dissolved into remorse, he turned and walked away from me. For a second I feared he’d accelerate and try to lose me—he didn’t respond when I called his name—but instead he walked slowly and dejectedly to the stairs and descended to the third floor and I followed a few feet behind as he moped through the dioramas of Pacific Peoples and Plains Indians. The surrounding nineteenth-century taxidermy and painted backgrounds felt at once dated and futuristic: dated because low-tech and methodologically presumptuous and insensitive; futuristic because postapocalyptic: it was as if an alien race had tried to reconstruct the past of the wasteland upon which they’d stumbled. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes or other movies from the sixties and seventies that I’d seen as a child in the eighties—movies whose distance from the present was most acutely felt in the quaintness of the futures they projected; nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.
On the second floor, in the strangely empty Hall of African Peoples, I stopped him and apologized, explained that I’d been worried and overreacted, pledged to give his mom a glowing report, and asked him to pick out whatever he wanted from the gift shop, where we proceeded together hand in hand; Roberto forgave me, but his excitement now was muted. I bought him a sixty-dollar T-rex puzzle because I would make strong six figures and the city would soon be underwater. I made sure the cashier removed the price tag, and I also purchased a couple of packets of astronaut ice cream, which Roberto had never tried.
We ate the freeze-dried Neapolitan stuff—a food from the future of the past, taken to space only once on Apollo 7, 1968—on a bench in front of the museum. It was an unseasonably warm day and the bizarreness and novelty of the food cracked Roberto up, restored his spirits; I broke off my chocolate and traded it for a fragment of his strawberry, which he found gross. He showed me his various drawings, which I praised, we discussed some additions to our diorama, and I told him how he’d one day be a famous paleontologist. His energy was back and it was as if I’d never caused a scene. We had a nice lunch at Shake Shack near the museum—a fast-food restaurant where the meat is carefully sourced, all the garbage compostable—and I returned him smiling and full of dinosaur factoids to Anita by four.
* * *
The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease; according to the menu, they are massaged “five hundred times.” The beak is removed and the small eyes are pushed out from behind. The corpses are slowly poached and then served with a sauce composed of sake and yuzu juice. It is the restaurant’s signature dish and so plate after plate of the world’s most intelligent invertebrate infants were being conducted from kitchen to table by the handsome, agile waitstaff. There were three on the plate finally placed before us, and my agent and I, after a moment of admiration and guilty hesitation, simultaneously dipped and ingested the impossibly tender things entire.
I had arrived for what would be an outrageously expensive celebratory meal still incredulous about the amount of money a publisher was willing to pay me to dilate my story, but, after we ordered and before the octopus and flights of bluefin arrived, I had quickly signed two copies of a contract. I asked my agent to explain to me once more why anybody would pay such a sum for a book of mine, especially an unwritten one, given that my previous novel, despite an alarming level of critical acclaim, had only sold around ten thousand copies. Since my first book was published by a small press, my agent said, the larger houses were optimistic that their superior distribution and promotion could help a second book do much better than the first. Moreover, she explained, publishers pay for prestige. Even if I wrote a book that didn’t sell, these presses wanted a potential darling of the critics or someone who mig
ht win prizes; it was symbolic capital that helped maintain the reputation of the house even if most of their money was being made by teen vampire sagas or one of the handful of mainstream “literary novelists” who actually sold a ton of books. This would have made sense to me in the eighties or nineties, when the novel was more or less still a viable commodity form, but why would publishers, all of whom seemed to be perpetually reorganizing, downsizing, scrambling to survive in the postcodex world, be willing to convert real capital into the merely symbolic? “Keep in mind that your book proposal…” my agent said, and then paused thoughtfully, indicating that she was preparing to put something delicately, “your book proposal might generate more excitement among the houses than the book itself.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your first book was unconventional but really well received. What they’re buying when they buy the proposal is in part the idea that your next book is going to be a little more … mainstream. I’m not saying they’ll reject what you submit, although that’s always possible; I’m saying it may have been easier to auction the idea of your next book than whatever you actually draft.”
I loved this idea: my virtual novel was worth more than my actual novel. But if they rejected it, I’d have to give the money back. And yet I planned to spend my advance in advance.
“Also, you have to remember an auction has its own momentum.”
This I understood, or at least recognized, from experience: most desire was imitative desire. If one university wanted to buy your papers, another university would want to buy them, too—consensus emerges regarding your importance. Competition produces its own object of desire; that’s why it makes sense to speak of a “competitive spirit,” a creative deity.
With my chopsticks I lifted and dipped the third and final baby octopus and tried to think as I chewed of a synonym for “tender.” Imitative desire for my virtual novel was going to fund artificial insemination and its associated costs. My actual novel everyone would thrash. After my agent’s percentage and taxes (including New York City taxes, she had reminded me), I would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Or Fifty-four IUIs. Or around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of Leaves of Grass. Or about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held. I swallowed and the majesty and murderous stupidity of it was all about me, coursing through me: the rhythm of artisanal Portuguese octopus fisheries coordinated with the rhythm of laborers’ migration and the rise and fall of art commodities and tradable futures in the dark galleries outside the restaurant and the mercury and radiation levels of the sashimi and the chests of the beautiful people in the restaurant—coordinated, or so it appeared, by money. One big joke cycle. One big totaled prosody.
“Of course, as we talked about, there are risks to taking a big advance—because if the book doesn’t sell at all, nobody’s going to want to work with you again.”
A quiet set of couples left the table beside us and almost instantly a loud set of couples took their place; the men, both around my age, both dressed in dark suits, both in great shape, were talking about a friend or colleague in common, mocking him for drunkenly spilling red wine on a priceless couch or rug; the women, eyes lined with shadow, were passing a cell phone back and forth, admiring a picture of something. I was confident my book wouldn’t sell.
“Just remember this is your opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You have to decide who you want your audience to be, who you think it is,” my agent said, and what I heard was: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table; make sure the protagonist undergoes a dramatic transformation.” What if only his aorta undergoes change, I wondered. Or his neoplasm. What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?
The sake-based cocktails were making the adjacent quartet increasingly garrulous. Investment bankers or market analysts in their twenties, whose proximity was particularly unwelcome since I was crossing my art with money more explicitly than ever, trading on my future. The first draft was due in a year.
“I think of my audience as a second person plural on the perennial verge of existence,” I wanted to say. A waiter shook the bottle to mix the sediment and turn the sake white.
“They need a highly liquid strategy,” someone at the adjacent table said.
“What happens if I give them a totally different book than the one described in the proposal?” I asked. Small plates of miso-glazed black cod were put before us. Someone refilled my glass.
“Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think.”
“I can’t see my audience because of the tungsten lights.” I emptied my glass.
“Do you have other ideas?”
“They got married on Turtle Island. Fiji. Karen said she saw Jay-Z on the beach.”
“A beautiful young half-Lebanese conceptual artist and sexual athlete committed to radical Arab politics is told by her mother, who is dying of breast cancer, that she’s been lied to about her paternity: her real father turns out to be a conservative professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. Or New Paltz. Wanting her own child, she selects a Lebanese sperm donor in an effort to project into the future the past she never had.” I shook my head no. Swift, Spanish-speaking laborers took away the plates. “Or maybe something more sci-fi: an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time. On a decommissioned train.”
She excused herself to go to the bathroom and the next small blue bottle was on the table so quickly it seemed to precede my signaling to the waitress, my ordering it. I shut my eyes for a long moment. “Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.” The noise was deafening now that I wasn’t talking or listening to anyone in particular. I tasted hints of pear, then peach. For a second all I heard was the desperation, the hysterical energy of passengers on a doomed liner. The rise and fall. The laughter of Mrs. Meacham’s class. My parents were dead, but I could get back to them in time. Seventy-three seconds into takeoff, my aorta dissected, producing high cirrus clouds, sign of an imminent tropical depression.
“That market’s completely underwater. Probably forever.”
I looked at my phone. “Your presence is requested at the Institute for Totaled Art,” Alena had texted.
Dessert was a yuzu frozen soufflé with poached plums. Money was a kind of poetry. The glasses of sweet wine were on the house. I was drunk enough now to down the remaining sake instead of setting it aside. The ink contains a substance that dulls the sense of smell, making the octopus more difficult to track.
“How exactly will you expand the story?” she asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.
“Like the princess in Sans Soleil, I’ll make a long list of things that quicken the heart.” We emerged from the restaurant into moving air. “And you can be on it.” The streets were wet, but it wasn’t raining now. We walked to the High Line entrance on Twenty-sixth and climbed the steps. The smell of viburnum, which either flowers in winter or had flowered prematurely, mixed with the smell of car exhaust.
“I’m going to write a novel that dissolves into a poem about how the small-scale transformations of the erotic must be harnessed by the political.” Three-fifths of my neurons were in my arms as I touched each stand of sumac carefully placed among the disused rails. Never again would I eat octopus.
“My advice, having sold some other proposals, is not to wait too long.” Now we were sitting on the wooden steps that overlook Tenth Avenue, liquid ruby and sapphire of traffic. “I mean, to get to work. The more you wait, the more the deadline looms. It can drive people crazy.” She lit a cigarette. “The residency is perfect timing. Don’t underestimate how much you can get done in those five weeks.”
I was leaving in two days. A foundation in Marfa, Texa
s, gives you a house, a stipend, a car. I’d accepted the offer almost a year ago, when I knew I’d be on leave from teaching, but not that I had a dilated aortic root or that there was acute demand for my abnormal sperm. I’d never done a residency or been to Texas. It was where Creeley died in the spring of 2005—they had rushed him to the nearest hospital three hours away in Odessa. My little house would be across the street from his. “I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other’s company,” I’d written in his voice to a version of myself.
FOUR
I felt like a ghost in the green hybrid, driving slowly around Marfa in the dark. It was my first night there: Michael, the caretaker of the residency houses, who was also a painter, had picked me up at the El Paso airport that afternoon and driven me in amicable silence for three hours through the high desert until we reached the little house at 308 North Plateau Street; I remember the address (you can drag the “pegman” icon onto the Google map and walk around the neighborhood on Street View, floating above yourself like a ghost; I’m doing that in a separate window now) because I had to have my beta-blockers mailed there twice during the residency, pills I take to reduce the vigor of my heart’s contractions, and which have the paradoxical effect of causing a minor tremor in my hand. When I arrived at the house—one floor, two bedrooms, with one room converted to a writer’s studio, no internal doors—I had set down my bags and, although it was only late afternoon, gone immediately to bed, not waking until a little before midnight. I lay in the alien sheets slowly remembering where I was: having slept through most of the ride, and then what was left of the daylight, I felt as though I’d moved from Brooklyn to the Chihuahuan Desert without transition. I tried to remember the light snow that morning in New York, beads of precipitation on the oval window streaking as the plane took off. It was Thursday; had I been at home, I would have heard the sound of the poor picking glass out of the recycling set along the street for Friday morning. Here it was quiet enough that I should have heard my heart beating; I imagined it was inaudible because of the drug.