The Cannibal's Prayer

The Cannibal's Prayer Page 16

by PW Cooper

  * * *

  The famous writer sits at his desk with the pen clutched in his thick fingers. She stands in the door the glass falls from her hands and it does not break on the soft carpet and in some distant part of herself she is disturbed by this it should have broken she wants to stomp on it and shatter the glass to pieces drive the shards into her feet the milk flows out soaks into the carpet he likes a glass of very cold milk when he is writing he says that it helps him focus she was going to surprise him she wasn't supposed to be home she wasn't supposed to find this. When it happened the famous writer clutched at his chest his head thrown back with an agonized expression on his face and his shirt twisted in his grip gripping at the heart he seems locked in his chair the milk flows out she cannot move or speak she wants to scream the famous writer's penis is hanging out from his open fly the black notebook on the heavy oak desk is twisted as though in the same torment as the man who had poured himself into it. She steps forward feeling very dizzy like she can hardly stand and she looks down she takes the crumpled paper the sun is setting outside the window in a haze of red-gold light and the cold milk is seeping into the carpet and she reads the last few sentences that the famous writer had penned had written out in his familiar heavy and slanted scrawl:

  Years later - decades later - I am released. They never cared about her, about that used up thing. I think that some of them were grateful to me. They were embarrassed by her, to see her old and ugly. I think they were more disgusted by the images shown during the trial and in the press of her careworn features than they were by the dissection. I heard people talk: Who cares? The bitch was a fuck-up, she needed to die. She was a joke. God but she was beautiful once. Too bad.

  They release me from prison and into the jaws of fame. I am an old man now, crippled and white and blossomed, my maleness in full bloom. How sad the way the female flower fades so quickly. I return to the hotel.

  A young woman, a girl, approaches me in the lobby. "You're famous, aren't you?" She looks at me. She is beautiful. "I've always wanted to be an actress," she says, "could you get me in a movie?"

  I tell her that I can. I must see if she has it, the body of fame. I get a hotel room, I get the same hotel room where I once took the famous woman. Nobody but me remembers her now. How short is immortality. When I am dead there will be nobody left to remember her.

  I put my hand on the child's naked back and I guild her towards the yawning doors of the elevator, standing open and waiting to rise. The moment that the doors close I take

  Life in the North

  "listen to me she said once said listen to me and I will give up to you all the secrets of this earth and she pressed her lips to mine"

  They drive together to the house way up there in the low blue New York hills. The road meanders through shaggy pine and drooping old sycamore and slim-fingered willow draped so low it almost touches the mirror-smooth pools of water that dot those hills which are in winter clad pure white and seem almost to have been copied off a painted postcard or a Bruegel canvas. This is the beauty of a new world this cold beauty which will bury you in snow and ice and grow yellow flowers on your grave life is hard here the people who live here are hard their spines curved their crag-rough faces set into the stereotypical form the rustic upstate the nature-lovers the snarled addicts the wild-eyed teachers of this academic heart beating in the wilds of the state. They're far out here far beyond the reach of civilization up among the sad small hills. The road is narrow and rough and not well-traveled it writhes through the hilly landscape twisting and bucking like it is trying to escape like it is a snake trying to fly. Vanessa grips the edge of her seat around every curve and her eyes go a little wide and fearful flicking now up to the curving black trunks of the naked trees just coming into bud that whir past like the lines of the bar-code she isn't used to this she comes from the City she grew up in the City in a Jersey suburb anyway that's close enough she works in the City in among high rises and the smog and the sound and the slow deadening crawl and she is not used to this unbound almost reckless speed. How long has the older woman the author's wife lived here probably for years too many years to count how well must she know these roads to know well enough there will be no cars coming down this road today she lets her vehicle drift sometimes over the center line which prompts every time a harsh intake of breath from her passenger does she know or is she reckless with loss perhaps good enough to her perhaps that they died together. Vanessa sees a harsh land clutched in the icy remains of a slow-melting winter she thinks she must see it with very different eyes than the older woman's that's unavoidable they are both wondering how they're going to get along and are both highly conscious of the fact that it has only been a few hours now since they put the older woman's husband in the ground and now here they are just met and possessing all that worry of being too close Vanessa knows it well enough knows a life cramped in subway cars and elevators with those whom she would rather avoid but never mind they must simply bear each other after all they have a job to do and here they are now turning up the long drive going slowly past the curtain of the proud black ash trees that stand in a line between the road and the house of Joanna and DC Glaser who is now deceased and buried back in his native Ithaca under the shade of a beloved oak like something out of poetry or a sentimental novel. That could be an epitaph could be a denouement could be the ending of the story. Vanessa cannot stop looking up at the trees how many trees there are in this cold part of the world she is more used to lampposts lampposts so ubiquitous that they seem natural pillars simply pillars holding up the roof of the world and the light they give only the illumination of a night sky after all how often do people really look up and see what is there above them what is between the trudging earth and the heavy gray clouds the distant black sky. The tires crunch in the broken gravel pavement of the drive it's an unnerving feeling the world is coming apart beneath you Vanessa is eager to have her feet once again on natural ground she wants to stand barefoot in the tall grass and she does not know why when she was a girl there was little enough grass she has no attachment to it no nostalgia or sentimentality and yet she feels now a deep and pure and almost spiritual need. The house below the low ridge is the cool gray color of a storming sea the windows all reflecting. Vanessa looks back over her shoulder at the walls of dark trees and shudders she feels or thinks she feels a sort of unearthly presence pawing through the ether I have found my way into a ghost story she thinks to herself knowing how ridiculous that sounds and yet there is a feeling here out in the thawed ice and the sweet bitter air. The driveway curves over and cracks like a black tongue. Vanessa follows the older woman down the path to the gray-green door the house has a kind of shaggy depth it feels old not exactly run-down but lived in rather she can feel the motion of time as she steps through the doorway she can feel as if physically manifested the expanse of life which has been spilled out inside these walls and lives here now trapped like a firefly dim inside cupped hands and batting at your palms.

  "I miss her god I miss her so much I can hardly breathe for want of her it's all I can do I just want to fall to the ground and hold myself ever since she left it feels like there's something missing something taken away which I will never find again"

  The older woman beckons Vanessa into her home and Vanessa comes timidly across the threshold. Vanessa looks at the older woman in the light of her home and sees her truly finally out from beneath the gray-black widow's veil Joanna does not look so old now not in the matronly or grandmotherly way her age seems rather to be worn around the mouth and in the depths of her eyes she moves with such a casual ease she is one who is comfortable in her own skin she is the sort of woman happiest in a loose sweater and jeans and shoes to wear out in the garden she walks down long dirt paths on sunny Sunday mornings before the world wakes and all the birds are singing for the rising sun she is a woman who seems not old but simply tired as though a deep sleep of some days or years would restore her not to youth exactly but to being again fully alive in
the way of the young to be drinking in the world with such easy ardor. Joanna looks at Vanessa straight in the eye and she smiles and Vanessa feels that though they have spoken hardly two words that they have become friends she feels the urge to take Joanna's hands in her own and to kiss her gently on both cheeks to wrap her arms around the tiny woman's slim shoulders and hold her close. How small she must have looked next to DC Glaser who was surely the largest man Vanessa has ever met and the most forceful and here is this delicate creature so small and strong and even like the riverbed which endures in its quiet way and does not look so beautiful until the sun catches the water and turns all to shine.

  -Let me show you your room / it's just this way.

  -Thank you Joanna.

  -Are you hungry at all / was it a long flight? / can I make you something?

  -I'm fine.

  -Nonsense / I'll put on tea and find us something / god knows we have enough food in this house.

  Vanessa laughs gently and says alright then if you insist in the pleased manner of a person who is being forced to get exactly what she wants this has always been her problem Vanessa thinks she is too reserved she will not say what she wants she merely waits and in the waiting grows anxious and needful and hungry she knows it must be frustrating for those who love her but she cannot change who she is she cannot remake herself she can only be. She knows that it was more her own fault and she cannot bear to know that I that terrible I pushed her away and now I will be alone and it is my fault. Vanessa will not even have what this woman Joanna had all those years of companionship she had only seven months seven beautiful months waking up warm in the sun and there was that soft ivory body warm beneath the sheets her green eyes opening and looking up at Vanessa and her lips open mouthing the words and smiling I love you baby and now that's gone forever and it was mostly my fault wasn't it she thinks sometimes that she cannot go on knowing she will not see that face again or hear those whispered words she will never have more than the memory growing increasingly distant and faint washed out like a photograph left fading in the sun. She rubs her eyes and Joanna sees says something about dust god she cannot bear to cry in front of Joanna.

  Down a darkened hall and there on the walls are pictures of the great writer standing arm in arm with his peers most of them she recognizes there with the Pulitzer Prize winner and there with the Nobel winner and there arm around the shoulders of Phillip Roth is it? at first she does not see Joanna in the pictures standing diminished in the background seeming insubstantial a wisp of a creature next to that vast bulk of celebrity. Vanessa remembers the first time she read one of his books it was the famous one of course The Mountain and God which was most everybody's first DC Glaser book unless they were one of those insiders now sneering across their wineglasses at those newcomers eager and pleased to have shown up late to the party and those already there thinking well here goes the neighborhood. She lived in that book for three months read it a half a dozen times never put it down never went anywhere without it and in the way of all beloved books it became a kind of totem and symbol by which she could chart the course of her own life see this here is my Mountain and God period and in this way she transforms her existence with its stretches of unmarked days and ceaseless study and feverish scribbling into a kind of traditional narrative see the arc and the rising action and the denouement she feels great relief to say the least at having fit her existence into the narrow confines of a written world. She never thought then that she might meet him never thought that she might become his assistant never thought that she might see him die and leave the world less and now be sent here to his home which seems to her a kind of holy sanctuary in which she is not worthy to tread. She has been sent here with one purpose to find the book the lost book the final manuscript which in his final note to Bradley DC had said was titled The Cannibal's Prayer and was nearly finished. She doesn't yet know what she will do when she finds the book she knows surely that she will read it. After that who can say.

  "I said never leave me never leave me never leave me and off you go like a bird taking flight here am I earthbound and gazing heavenward"

  The guest room is small and cramped in a way which she finds strangely comforting there is one small window which looks out on a little lake below out there somewhere in the wilds around this isolated home. Joanna shows her about the room and then leaves her there to unpack and in the unpacking Vanessa is reminded of all that she has lost in these past few days. One by one she takes her things from her bags and sets them on the bedspread which seems musty but not unpleasant a kind of earthy scent that reminds Vanessa of childhood. She didn't bring very many clothes what she does have she lays on the bed a few slacks a pair of shorts her socks neatly folded thick and white and her shirts a sweater a jacket a few pairs of underwear somehow it all looks childish she feels embarrassed DC never cared what she wore but here in his house and him dead now she feels embarrassed she should have packed something classier something with style she doesn't want Joanna to see her like this in her jeans with the ragged hem and her sweater with the baggy arms that slide down over her hands the one that hangs on her body formless and bulky but why should she care what the old woman thinks? Still. There is something about Joanna Glaser something deep down beneath the surface hidden away years ago and never let out guarded inside try as she might Vanessa cannot think of her as just an old woman she is Joanna and there is something terribly alluring about that Vanessa blushes what a fucking thing to think she's old enough to be your mother and straight besides more to the point the widow of DC Glaser. Vanessa puts away her clothes in the little dresser and tries not to think she tries merely to be to exist without identity without consciousness here in this place it's not a big room but it's comfortable she feels at once at home there the way you feel sometimes the kind of dreamy hominess of a summer cottage on the shores of a familiar sea sunlight spilling through the dirty window air swimming with dust-motes drifting you can feel it on your skin. She steps to the window almost presses her nose to the glass and she looks out and sees the ice gleaming on the surface of the pond. She feels very sure that they will find the book soon and just as sure that it will be something special and there is in that a sort of delirious unbelief that she could possibly be involved as she had always wanted in something special something which would endure which would be remembered.

  The teapot in the other room begins to scream. Vanessa wonders if there is something wrong in the world. DC Glaser is dead. She goes to the kitchen and Joanna smiles not exactly a friendly smile but an expression of welcome and acceptance at least and she pushes a steaming mug across the pitted and scarred surface of the hardwood table she tells Vanessa to drink Vanessa thanks her and sits she wraps her hands around the warm mug and she lifts it to take a little sip it's too hot she puts it down they look at each other and there is a question on Joanna's lips wanting to spill out and after she puts down a little plate of crackers and brae in the center of the table it does come out all in a rush.

  -What did you do for my husband / Vanessa?

  -I was his assistant.

  -Yes yes I know / but what did you do?

  -Well it was mostly over the phone / he said he needed somebody in New York to

  -But what about Bradley / I mean isn't that Bradley's job? / what is the point of having an agent and an assistant if your assistant acts like an agent? / I just can't understand this.

  -I worked for Bradley

  -I know you worked for Bradley / for god's sake I know you worked for Bradley I want to know why / what the hell did you do that Bradley couldn't? / I'm sorry / it's just it's been such a day.

  -I understand.

  -I just can't figure it out.

  -Well the thing is / Bradley told me / I don't know if you know how Bradley is but

  -I do know how Bradley is yes.

  -He told me that David wanted a woman / I know how that sounds but I never took it that way.

  -Maybe you should have.

  -I'm sorry
?

  -How well did you know my husband?

  -I feel like I knew him pretty well / we talked on the phone and

  -That's not what I mean and you know it.

  -Joanna I don't

  -You did press bookings / book tours / that kind of thing?

  -Well yes.

  -Did you screw him?

  -Did I what?

  -Did you screw my husband it's a simple question.

  -No.

  -No?

  -Joanna I / that's not / I'm not.

  -You're not what? You wouldn't have been the first but then you probably know that / I'm not bitter I understand how it is with men like DC I was never jealous I just didn't want it in my house / he promised me it would never happen in my house and here you are his kept girl did he visit you when he came to the city did you go with him when he was on his book tours?

  -I'm not interested / not in men / in that way I mean / I'm

  -Oh.

  -And even if I wasn't I would never do that that's not the sort of person I am and I resent the implication that my work was / that my motives were / is that really what you think of me?

  -I don't know quite what to say.

  -You could start with an apology.

  -Now I've made you angry / oh god.

  -It isn't you / it's all this / I mean / how did it ever turn out like this?

  -I'm sorry I said that / god I don't know what was going through my head / it's just / you understand it's so hard to love a man like David I don't mean / it was easy to fall in love with him just hard to live with him he never treated me wrong I just / I miss him so much and all I can think about is all the time I never had with him / wondering how much there was I didn't know about him / you understand?

  -I know how that feels.

  -I hope not / you're still too young for that.

  -Maybe.

  -How old are you Vanessa?

  -Twenty-nine.

  -Twenty-nine / I can hardly remember being twenty-nine / I was a different person when I was twenty-nine / a completely different person.

  -What kind of person were you?

  -Well it was the eighties / late seventies maybe but what's the difference / we were so excited so angry so ready to fight I was one of those dangerous feminist agitators / they used to be frightened of people like me who would believe that?

  -I knew there was something about you I liked.

  -Did you now.

  -I knew we were going to get along.

  -I'm sorry to have let you down.

  -You haven't.

  -I suppose that I was about your age when I first met David / DC / I never liked that him shortening his name going by his initials it felt cheap to me like he was playing a role it was like a persona he took on I never wanted that I only ever wanted David / whoever that was I'm not quite sure now.

  -What was he like back then?

  -Young / we were both young then but I guess we thought we knew pretty much everything we were in our thirties what could possibly be left to learn? He was a graduate student working at some coffee shop just clearing tables and writing in his spare time you know whenever he could he always carried around a little notebook or a scrap of paper in his back pocket and he was always stopping to scribble something down he never stopped doing that you know did it right up until / well you know.

  -You met in a coffee shop?

  -That's right I used to go there with my boyfriend / have a biscuit you look hungry / I can't remember when I first noticed David / there was something about him even then he'd be wiping off a table or mopping the floor or something and he would just stop didn't matter what was going on around him he would just stop and he'd get this intense look and he'd take out his paper and scribble down some idea and you could tell that there was something special about him.

  -You had a boyfriend?

  -He was sweet but neither of us was serious about it / when I told him about David he gave me a kiss and he told me that he would miss me / I told him to shut up I wasn't interested / but he knew he could see right through me and he'd seen the way David looked at me when we came in seems like everybody knew it except me / I don't know / why are two people ever attracted to each other? / just chemistry? / biological fate?

  -So how did you introduce yourself?

  -I just / well I just did it / I'm forward you may have noticed my father always said too forward but what did he know? / I asked David what he was writing and he looked at me like I'd caught him at something and he hid his notebook away and I said again what are you writing and he sat down and he started to tell me about the book he was writing I didn't even know his name yet and I guess he didn't know mine either but he started telling me about it and I just listened I just drank it in and I guess I fell in love.

  -Wow / that's incredible.

  -It felt like it made sense at the time.

  -What was the book?

  -Life in the North of course that wasn't what he was calling it then / the publisher came up with that name / he didn't even have a title when he was telling me about it / he said that if I helped him with it he'd let me choose the title / I still think of it by that name.

  -What did you call it?

  -Oh what does it matter now it's been so long since we wrote it.

  -We?

  -David and I / I was a writer back then you know / at least I thought I was / we rewrote most of what he had together / there was one chapter that came from a short-story of mine he asked to use it and it ended up being in the book it was that kind of book I don't know if you've ever read it but it was that kind of book / all bits and pieces.

  -I've read it / did you really write it? / why weren't you credited?

  -Oh it was David's baby of course I didn't want that I mean he offered but I said no it was his I didn't want my name on it like that I mean I'm not a writer I'm just a / well / nobody likes a book with more than one author it doesn't look artistic / they like to think of a book as a peak into a person's mind / anyway they said it wouldn't sell with a woman's name on it.

  -I've always loved that book / I knew there was something different about it / I figured it was just that it was his first / did you help write any of his others?

  -Oh no no no / after that first one David did it all himself / I don't know maybe he just needed the confidence of success / after it got published he realized that he didn't need help I suppose / I mean I still read them and gave him suggestions / for the first few anyway / besides I never wanted to be a writer.

  -Are you sure about that?

  -What do you mean?

  -Never mind / sorry.

  -Please / dig in.

  -Oh no / I'm not hungry.

  -Suit yourself.

  -So / did you want to try and start today? / with the papers I mean.

  -God not today / I'm sorry / maybe tomorrow / I'm just so tired / god it's been such a day I feel wrung out / I don't think I can stay awake / is that alright?

  -Of course / I'm sorry.

  -No no / help yourself to anything / plenty of food just help yourself / I'm sorry I just don't think I can keep my eyes open.

  -Get some rest.

  -Vanessa?

  -Yes?

  -I'm glad you're here / I'm very glad.

  -Thank you.

  -I'm glad.

  Then comes the quiet at the end of the day the sun falls from the sky the moon comes up blue and a lonely blackbird calls from its perch and we hover together in the moment before all the world sinks into darkness. Vanessa wanders about the house of the dead writer taking in all the artifacts of his life holding them in her hands holding them against her skin. She remembers again having almost forgotten somehow her own desires her own dreams of creation of artistry of expression she remembers sitting in classes small classes in top-floor classrooms with a dozen other students talking together about books like those of DC Glaser and all of them thinking all of them feeling that somehow maybe they could someday create something like that it's be
en ten years now and none of them have what is there to show for life but the empty living of it consuming art as they consume air or water bereft of creation and aching for a chance to be expressed. She remembers the teachers the other students the things they said the things they told her you're not being true to yourself you need to write about what you know you need to write about your life and what they really mean she eventually realized was that she needed to write more black more woman more lesbian they need to put her in a box in a category they're no different from the kids who made fun of her in high school in middle school from the very beginning it wasn't easy but then it's never easy for anybody and all those white boys their scruffy unshaven faces and adolescent ideas and those white men their beards and their novels telling her that she needs to get into her box and she just assumed that they were right because they looked like the authors she loved and she tried to do it but it isn't her and she gave it up and put it behind her and let it die and there was only ever one person in all the world besides her mother who ever believed in her and she pushed that person away oh god she pushed her away and now she's alone alone.

  "why won't you show me I know its good I know because you wrote it and I know you I know there is something beautiful inside you waiting to get out and you only need to let it out what do you think you're hiding from anyway?"

  She is sitting on the edge of the bed and looking out the window and dusk is falling it falls so quietly out here everything is so quiet Vanessa has never known such perfect silence she rises from the bed and walks out the door out into the grassy yard. The blue white ice melting away from the gray green grass the earth showing through black. The garden around the corner in wintery disarray what once were rows and order is now reduced to a sprawl like the spread of a bacteria like the spread of humanity across the world. She stands there and in the fading light she looks at the house of the dead author it seems so much older a hundred years at least a few hundred more older than any ancestors of European men upon this continent she touches the walls the stone walls rough cut smooth with that haphazard quality of a grimly stacked wall the kind you might see running low over some far-off dell there is moss growing there on the bottom of the walls and the only clear surface is that of the glass windows inset and shining out. She walks around the side of the house tracing her fingers along the corner and watching the imprints of her shoes in the soft spring dirt. There is the lake glassy and shimmering and now subdued beneath the moon. It's too early in the year still for insects to come out she sits down beside the house and the stillness is so deep it is almost frightening no voices no cars no gunshots ringing out from across the street no wailing infants down the hall how can it be that this world is not man's world?

  She hears a noise behind her. A sort of jangle a crash even. She turns around she looks scanning the horizon but no the sound is much closer very close. She looks across the face of the house and sees she thinks she sees a flicker of movement through the window. She steps closer and a feeling like fear steals into her. She swallows. She looks closer past dusk light past reflections of aching trees stretching their long limbs skyward. Surely that is all she saw just the movement of trees reflected in the window. She cups her hands around her eyes and presses her face to the glass. There are explanations for what happens next which are really quite convincing and rational. A trick of the light. An expression of pure uneasy imagination. Any number of explanations. She presses her face to the glass and she looks into the room and something comes rushing at her rushing towards her rushing right towards the glass with enough speed and weight to shatter it she tumbles back and falls on her bottom in the soggy dirt and stares up at the unbroken window with her mouth open and her eyes wide her hands clutching nothing in a panic.

  She rises.

  She brushes her buttocks and the backs of her thighs. She looks at the window at the empty room inside. She shakes her head and sighs. She feels foolish. At once she dismisses the occurrence she doesn't have any interest in such things she has more important thoughts on her mind she decides only that she will look to see if perhaps Joanna was in that room whichever room it is.

  She returns to the house she finds Joanna's bedroom door shut and no light spilling out from beneath so she goes on towards the rear of the house and easily enough she finds the room she is sure this is the room and it gives her pause for a moment because she is sure this must be DC Glaser's study the room where he died she feels a chill work down her spine.

  Vanessa closes herself in the room and she turns on the light. There is the window untouched as it is and there is the desk where the great author must have written and there are the bookshelves lined with dusty works and there are the boxes and drawers and shelves piled high with all his papers all his manuscripts all his diaries all the artifacts of his life. She feels that she cannot breathe properly. The shadows lie heavy on the floor deep and velvet black in long languid pools. She touches the shelves caresses the spines of the books strokes her thumb over loose leafs of paper this is the lifetime of the man here at her fingertips she finds her throat closing she does not know if she is excited or sad. She saw his grave today stood there in the wind she watched the coffin lowered into the dirt and read the letters of his name carved in dark granite. And now this room is before her no less indelible an inscription the whole world is a tombstone today she sees it in the trees sees it in the water sees it in the very surface of the sun his name etched and gleaming dull.

  There on the surface of the heavy oak desk is a scrap of paper paper torn maybe from a simple notebook lined paper the college-ruled blue lines faint just paper but what is this paper and by whose hand were those heavy slanted black ink letters dashed down and spelling out word after word in furious unease she knows the hand well enough though knows it less spidery and less brutally made than this. She recognizes the penmanship of the great author the dead author the famous author the dead dead dead author has this to say but what the hell is it and what the hell does it mean?

  She lay there, just lay there and let the music wash over her. She had always loved this music. Her chin bobbed in time with the soft bass. I stared at her bare toe, twitching. She had beautiful feet, beautiful toes; her legs were beautiful, long legs, the sort that seemed to go on forever, to go all the way up. I reached down and I stroked her thigh. She giggled and shifted away from me. I held her leg. She went silent, lay back and let the music wash over her.

  She looked at me. "I don't exist," she told me, "I'm dead."

  "What do you mean?" I asked. I wasn't worried, she often said such things. She had a taste for the macabre, it was one of the first things I loved about her. "You're not dead," I told her, "you're right here with me."

  She smiled. She shifted, and the sheets beneath her wrapped around her firm body. "You're dreaming," she said, and she took my face in her hands. She kissed me. "Look at yourself."

  I looked down. I recognized the body, my body. Firm muscles, everything firm and tight, my cock wet with sex. "It's my body," I said.

  "You're dreaming," she said again. She reached down to grasp my prick in her hand. Her thin pale fingers wrapped around me. I bit hard at my lip. She smiled again. "You're excited," she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "You want me," she said.

  "Yes," I said, again.

  She began to stroke my cock. I was hard with lust, shaking, trembling there on the bed. I wanted to hold her, to wrap myself around her, to press myself into her, to smother her with my love, cover her with my body. I'd never known anybody like her. I remember the first time I saw her, sitting there in the coffee shop with that other guy. I was jealous. I wanted her. I never thought I would actually have her. And then she came to me. She came to me and I was just a shy little boy with a notebook and a dream, a few scribbles and a hope to change the world. She wanted me to come to her apartment, asked me right there in the coffee shop. I told her no, no let's go to my place. She nodded, "Okay," she said, "your place."

  I was a v
irgin. She wasn't, but I didn't fault her for that, how could I? I wanted what she had. I knew I wasn't the first, but my desire for her was such that I didn't care. She was so wet for me, so soft around me, I felt like I was sinking into her, that soft wet pink and at once I understood, I understood for the first time the history of mankind. I understood why the Greeks went to war over Helen of Troy, understood every war since. I knew at once that I must have her, I wanted to own her, to have that wet pink soft thing always. I loved her.

  And then she opened my eyes. "What are you thinking about?" she asked.

  "I love you," I said. She laughed.

  And now I open my eyes, really open them. She is lying beside me, her body shriveled and ugly with age. She is dry down there, the sweet pink color faded, her softness turned coarse. Her breasts sag, her skin sags. She is sixty-one years old, thirty years past her prime. I had her for such a short time. Sometimes when I look into her eyes, her eyes which alone have not changed, I look into her soft brown eyes and I see her as she was and I remember how I loved her so.

  That time is gone now. She is old now. I am old but I do no feel old. She acts old and I do not, I am full still with life and she has been diminished by age. She reminds me of my mother almost. I cannot bear to touch her, to look on her naked body. Her sex repulses me. She wants me still, still goes moist and eager for me, still reaches out to take me. I cannot stand to see her look of betrayal when I turn away. A part of me wants her still, still remembers. Even my mother was young once.

  I cannot endure this.

  Vanessa reads it and reads it again and again the spidery furious writing she wonders if Joanna saw this. She leaves the study with the paper still in her hand she wanders into the kitchen where there is a lone candle burning she stares into the wavering flame the wandering flame that seems to float apart from the wick seems to burn with a deathless endurance. She touches the corner of the page to the flame and she watches it burn watches it all burn away the words of a dead man turning to smoke in the air turning to nothing and writhing in the air like a ghostly spirit which will not die no matter the cost of remaining here in the cold north here beneath the indifferent eye of a gray moon.

  She blows out the candle and with a wisp of rising smoke the fire is gone.

  A Weakness

  Joanna wakes again to an empty bed and reaches out for him reaching in the morning darkness for her husband's body lying there beside her and feels a surge of panic when she cannot find him before she again remembers he is dead he is dead he is never coming back and she thinks there will never be another there for her there in her bed she will be empty and one day they will find her lying here not breathing just staring at the ceiling the way she is now and they will shake her and prod her and call out to her but she will not rise she will not wake she will be gone. Joanna cannot bring herself to move she cannot bring herself to cry she misses him she misses the feel of him beside her how accustomed she had become to his presence. The emptiness is deep inside her a gaping growing emptiness which drinks in all the light of the world which drinks in every good thought she has never known life without his presence David's presence which was such an enormous weight had always filled the emptiness not healed her not repaired her only filled the space like taping wax paper over a broken windowpane it just makes the hurt a little dimmer and now that too has been stripped away so that she feels it always and entire. Her's is such an empty life.

  The woman Vanessa is still asleep the whole world it seems is still asleep Joanna loves these early hours hardly different than night really but for the anticipation that undeniable and unevidenced sensation that the sun is rising is coming up to the horizon and will break over that treeline any moment the whole of the earth is holding its breath for that first shining moment given no proof but memory. She goes quietly out into the predawn.

  There are footprints in the melting snow footprints circling the house circling around and around could it have been Vanessa maybe walking in the night? Joanna frowns at the footprints she follows she feels almost like she is following in her own footsteps she wonders if she could have been sleepwalking somehow sleepwalking circles around the house she puts her foot inside the clearest footprint it is much too large for her the prints are the size of David's boots her foot is swallowed by the print she kicks away the snow obliterating the evidence could she have been sleepwalking in David's shoes? But that's nonsense she is going crazy isn't she that must be it dear god she's always been afraid of losing her mind she watched it happen to both her grandparents and then to David's father she couldn't bear to see it happen to herself not now after all she isn't so old just sixty that's not so old she still has dreams she still wants to do things god there are so many things she still wants to do but look what can happen look at what happened to David dead at his desk with the pen in his hand and everything he wanted everything he hoped for all his plans evaporated vanished just gone from the world everything he could have been wiped out in the space of a blink there were times she could not bear life the unfairness of it better never to have lived than to face death she wishes that she could believe in a god any god any possibility of eternity she would accept anyone anything else any horror if only she could make herself believe it but she can not accept can not bear to think that this that she that everything that is herself could would one day maybe one day soon end.

  She goes then she leaves the yard and walks on down the road down the long slow slope into the green valley below.

  The sun is up when she returns and Vanessa is awake sitting at the table in the kitchen watching a bowel of stale cereal go soft and soggy. She smiles when she sees Joanna coming in a relieved smile that she tries to hide behind her hand like she doesn't want Joanna to see that she was worried

  -I thought I was alone.

  -Hm?

  -Never mind / sorry / I guess I'm not awake yet.

  -Where'd you find that?

  -It was in the cupboard there / was I not supposed to?

  -No no you're welcome to it I can't imagine it's any good though / let me make you something.

  -Oh it's fine / anyway I wouldn't want to waste

  -Nonsense / give it to me / you know what they say right life is short don't waste a single breakfast.

  -I suppose / thank you.

  -Listen to me / such a bunch of shit isn't it?

  -What is?

  -Me / I am / I was this same way when my parents died did you know that they died together? / I fall back on this crape diem bullshit / usually lasts a few months before it's gone again we have pretty short memories really at least I do don't let me speak for anybody else / but it's a common enough thing I mean how many people really keep their New Year's Resolutions does anybody? / How do you like your eggs do you mind eggs you're not vegan are you no of course not I remember.

  -Any way is fine Joanna.

  -I'll make an omelette / you might be surprised I'm not such a bad cook you just pick it up / never really saw myself as a domestic sort not when I was younger still don't I guess / you just end up doing things we're like water we're liquid we just seep down into the cracks there's nothing solid in our lives we just migrate just go soft and sink down / cheddar peppers onion tomato is that alright?

  -That sounds great thank you.

  -It does doesn't it.

  -Are you always this talkative in the morning?

  -Ha ha / I don't suppose I am no I'm sorry didn't you sleep well last night? / there isn't a problem with the room is there?

  -I'm sorry just I'm not much of a morning person never have been / you've got a coffee machine right?

  -We do of course we do David couldn't live without coffee he was the same way an absolute wreck no offense.

  -Absolutely none taken / I am a wreck ha ha.

  -What did you mean when you said you thought you were alone what did you mean by that?

  -What?

  -You said it when I came in / what did that mean?

  -I / I just / It was just the
lack of sleep I suppose you know.

  -Come on.

  -No really / my college roommate used to actually talk in her sleep she'd say the weirdest shit pardon my language horrible things sometimes but awake she was the sweetest girl you ever met like an angel I wonder some times what she dreamed about / if there was maybe a whole other side of her that was completely unlike her waking life a / I don't know / a malevolent spirit inside.

  -I was just thinking about sleepwalking / you don't sleepwalk do you?

  -No / you?

  -Not that I know of / no somnambulists here then good enough / how do you take your coffee? / I started it before I left this morning / god I didn't even knew I was doing it hardly I'm just so used to making it for David you know I've been brewing a pot every morning this whole week / like I'm expecting him to come slouching out in his bathrobe and pour himself a cup / it's just routine now everything automatic / black?

  -God no / sugar you do have sugar?

  -Of course.

  -And cream / I never liked the taste much I guess I just need the / the / you know the jolt of it.

  -Here / eat.

  -Oh thank you.

  -You're welcome / have you seen the lake yet? / beautiful especially this time of year.

  -It was getting dark I didn't really see.

  -You'll have to take a walk out that way sometime.

  -How did your parents die Joanna? / was it an accident? / if you don't mind me asking?

  -It's the strangest thing Vanessa the strangest thing I feel like I have known you for a very long time I feel like we're kindred spirits is that foolish of me?

  -No I don't think it's foolish.

  -I feel as though I can tell you things / anything / I feel like I can trust you.

  -I like to think that I'm a trustworthy person.

  -Don't we all / but do you understand what I'm saying?

  -These are incredible eggs Joanna.

  -I've had plenty of practice funny how it goes sometimes / I never wanted to be the domestic one never wanted to be a mother certainly not David's mother especially not her / he was like a child in a lot of ways / David never really grew up he was so used to having things done for him / it was an incredible thing to see Vanessa absolutely incredible the way he could write the things that he did / I moved in with him while we were trying to publish the first book still and he was just starting the second.

  -A Weakness.

  -That's the one / he would write things / my god / he used to give me the pages hand them over with this sheepish expression on his face like he'd been caught doing something wrong and I would read them I swear to you they made me cry they were so good so fucking beautiful I could taste it / it was poetry pure poetry what he wrote the way he could capture what it was like to be alive what it was like to feel the pain of living what it was like to hope to dream he had it he somehow had access to it found the way to get at it which I'd been looking for my whole life and never found / but then I'd look at him and there he was simpering whining snapping at me to cook for him to do his dishes to do his laundry / this man who could capture the essence of humanity with just a few paragraphs and he was absolutely incapable of keeping his own life together.

  -What happened?

  -I left him / I don't think I've ever told anybody that / I left him I just couldn't live like that not a bra-burner like me I couldn't stand to be subservient couldn't accept it.

  -But you did marry him.

  -The fact is Vanessa what they don't tell you what nobody likes to talk about the simple truth is that love is more important than dignity / people will put up with just about anything if they know that they're loved and he did love me / then.

  -I'm sorry.

  -Oh it wasn't all bad wasn't even mostly bad it's just not what I wanted / I wanted to be a symbol you know wanted to represent something wanted to take a stand / strong independent woman / and look where we end up / you wonder how it could have happened you compromise once and then you compromise again and then again and again until finally you've compromised everything that was important that made you who you are and there's nothing left but what he's made of you and you can't do anything but accept it.

  -But why

  -Why let it happen? / I've been asking myself that / all I can say is that I loved him / what else is there?

  -These are very good eggs Joanna.

  -Thank you.

  -Do you suppose we should start?

  -Start?

  -Going through DC's old papers.

  -Do you really think we'll find anything?

  -I hope so.

  -Hm.

  -Where do you want to begin?

  -In the basement he's got some boxes down there I doubt we'll find anything but we might as well start there might as well turn over every rock / might as well turn over the dirtiest slimiest one first.

  -Okay.

  -Finish your coffee.

  Joanna clears the plate puts it there in the sink it is for her such a familiar motion. She remembers the way she used to sit and fume while her mother did dishes she remembers watching her father slouched oblivious at the head of the table with his paper folded over and his eyes half-lidded and she just stewing in a torrent of restrained invective watching her mother clean those dirty plates and feeling nothing so much as pity and a kind of disappointment all the while wanting to ask her mother how how could you let this happen how could you let yourself be lowered to this and now it has happened to Joanna and she is asking the same questions of herself and she has no better answer now than she ever heard. Vanessa comes and stands beside her not saying anything and Joanna is up to her wrists in soapy water with her sleeves rolled up to the elbow and she is crying not just crying but sobbing great shaking sobs that come from way down inside and cannot but out. Vanessa reaches into the water her skin is very dark unmixed dark she wraps her hands around Joanna's hands and draws them out and she says let me take care of that Joanna. And all Joanna can do is nod and sob and hold out her hands dripping soapy water down the length of her forearms all the way down to her rolled up sleeves. She weeps.

  Vanessa Bowen is taller than Joanna by a good four inches but then Joanna's only about five three so that's not saying so much Vanessa is built with a kind of solid curvy elegance though Joanna hates that word curvy it feels condescending but in this case it's too accurate not to use she has the body type of one of those old Rococo paintings she is all strength and shape a strong nose and a strong chin and her brown eyes are bright almost eerily bright her mouth is soft her lips are full. Joanna finds that she is staring and she flushes with embarrassment what is she thinking? She wipes the tears from her eyes wipes the wetness from her cheeks come on she says leave the dishes we'd better start the basement's just this way.

  Here is the basement door standing shut. The ivory paint chipped and peeling back off the pale green coat beneath David was an obsessive painter he repainted the house every couple years it seemed and now the paint is already peeling away how is that possible it is almost as though the house was bound to his spirit and now bereft is crumbling around her. She touches a loose flake of paint it comes away it falls soundlessly. The doorknob is old worn brass that has over such time been polished smooth by their hands. She pushes open the door and the darkness of the basement is so thick it seems to come toward them a kind of gravitational force pulling them into that hypnotic darkness which could contain anything. She should not feel that she knows she should not feel it she is too old for this she is an adult she does not have to be afraid of the dark but still it frightens her somewhere way inside in some untouched reservoir of childhood terror there is that image of the deathly pale hand reaching up and out wrapping cold fingers round her ankle pulling her down forever down. She flicks on the light switch its one of those heavy switches that clicks audibly the lights down there come flickering on one at a time almost hesitantly as though they are as afraid as she. The floor is unfinished concrete it does not feel like a home it is the embod
iment of secret it is where the truth comes to hide. If there is something of David's which he had wanted hidden away then this is where it will be.

  Perhaps Joanna is being selfish perhaps she knows she will find no lost manuscripts here perhaps she isn't looking for Bradley's book perhaps she is looking now for her own sake wondering if she might find another black notebook like that one which was left open upon his desk when he died which had hidden that terrible hateful story of his. What was that who was he really had he been hiding so much from her for so long? She can not bear to face it again alone.

  Vanessa goes down first brushing past the ragged shreds of cobwebs. Joanna watches her go thinking there is something about her some buried effulgence some deep longing such a desire within and she follows her carefully down. Listen to the rasp of the shoes on the concrete steps like a voice calling from its ruined throat listen to the rasp rasp rasp of grit and dirt and stone grinding against old concrete. Listen to the awful scurrying of tiny claws retreating twitch-nosed and high-eared into the dark corners the chittering of the rodents and the insects and the crawling things that live in this subterranean blackness.

  -Do you know what we're looking for?

  -I'll know it when I see it.

  And Joanna thinks here we are picking through the rubble like survivors after the bomb crawling in the ruin for scraps. She still doesn't know how to feel about all this. She hadn't liked anything he'd written in the past decade or so everything changed after he became famous just famous enough to be recognized in the grocery store standing there with a head of iceberg lettuce cupped in his hand and pointed at stared at by strangers what did they want from him? She could never understand it. Far worse were the fans the obsessives the passionate god she hated the fans hated their drive their abdication of self didn't matter the target of their affection sports fan music fan book fan they were all pathetic she thought they were weak they were frail and not fully human what human would give up their discretion like that for a fan there is no good and no bad there is only the object of worship and then aside that everything else there were DC Glaser's books and aside that were other books and that was the only true distinction of quality. The fan lets their life become bound up in the lives of their heroes gives up their own dreams and lets the dreams of others stand in for what is lost. And what a viscous creature is a fan so quick to turn on you to tear you apart if you dare not obey the subliminal collective will you are not an individual you are a component of their own existence of their own dream your art is not your expression it is theirs and they will not let you take it away not without a fight. She remembers encountering some of her husband's fans a few years ago students she thought at the time probably former students of his they found her in town on a gloomy August evening just before nightfall out on the commons they converged on her three of them three men three young men and all of them with that coiled virility of youth that threat that brutal violent sexuality that frail restraint it was just after Undertime which David's fans had hated with such vehemence and there they were descending on her surrounding as though to bury her under the weight of their questions accusations insinuations all their witty sarcastic double-talk all that language of clever savagery which intelligent young men use especially when they are talking to an older woman all insecurities and resentments talking down to her and trying to impress her. When she finally got away from them she felt like she was crawling she realized that she had been apologizing to them practically begging them not to punish her for what David had written she remembers the feeling of abjection the skin-crawling sense of violation she remembers sinking down onto the bench across from the playground and shaking unable to move to keep on only shaking with an angry fear. She hadn't liked any of her husband's last four books. She didn't think that he'd written them with any purpose nor for any need on his part he had written them she felt for his audience written them for his critics written them because they were what he felt was expected of him. Look there goes the artist that sad fragile creature which does not know which cannot know why it exists after all that's what we really want in this world is to know what we are made for and to know that what we create has meaning and value and the only way you can be sure it to make it for the audience for the critics it's fucking cowardice Joanna thinks she finds it revolting the echo chamber the circle-jerk the buddy-buddy back-scratching incestuous blindness of it all. And the artist becomes the component of a system of commerce becomes a puppet of academics and intellectuals and fools becomes nothing becomes an emptiness. Nothing is wrong here. Nothing is wrong here. Nothing is wrong here.

  Vanessa opens a box. It is full of David's papers. She takes them out. She sits on the bottom step and begins slowly and methodically to work her way through them reading this and scanning over that. There are five such boxes all filled with his papers. There is no art in this only the dross only the raw material what can come from this there is nothing here but product potential product Joanna feels sick to her stomach she does not like the quiet dark the close quiet dark of the basement she's always been a bit claustrophobic never liked to get too close she can feel the walls closing in around her the darkness opening wide its jaws its silver teeth flickering with saliva its mouth preparing to swallow whole all that she is she picks up a piece of paper and begins to read.

  Tom,

  I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I feel like time is completely out of control, that I'm out of step somehow. I feel lost. I'm still working at the cafe, still shoveling the shit, as it were. I can't fool myself anymore, can't keep telling myself that it's all going to mean something someday. I have to face the truth: I cannot do this. I write and write and write but it's never good enough; nobody's interested in what I have to say. I'm not even interested anymore. I suppose it was arrogant of me to think that I could do this, I mean, how many people actually pull it off? But it's all I ever wanted, you know that. It's all I could ever do. All these years I have had that to cling to, that I am special somehow, that I have something to say and if only I could get it out then they would all listen. Well I've said it now, but nobody's interested.

  I have so many rejection letters piled up now I can hardly believe it. At this rate I'll go broke paying for postage. I'm starting to lose faith. I can't quite see the point of sending my stuff out anymore. There is no hope left in me, I send out the letters knowing that I will be rejected, knowing that I have already failed. So why bother sending them at all? I'm only writing for myself at this point, and I can't see how that's ever going to change. I've done my best work here Tom, already done the best I will ever do, and it's not good enough. It will never be good enough.

  You'll forgive the melodrama, Tom. But now that I know that everything I wanted is gone, I have no choice but to make a totally new life for myself. I wonder what I'll be. That's the problem, of course; writing is all I was ever good at, all I was ever comfortable with. I look around these days at the faces of the people in the cafe, all those aging faces, I can see their abandoned dreams clinging like trails of lace. Sad, really. I've become one of those pitiful people, Tom, and I am so terribly alone.

  This life was arrogance. Anybody who aspires to art is hungry for the fate of Prometheus, all of us snatching fire from the gods, all of us blowing the coals. We're pitiful, Tom, you and I; everything we want to do has already been done, done generations ago. I should have been a historian or an archeologist. Everything we can do has already been done. I don't see the point anymore of creating something, especially not a novel. The novel is a dead medium, artistically speaking. There's nothing new here for us to find, all the stones have been turned over, all the gold unearthed and spent. There are more great books in the world than can be read in a lifetime, so why write more? What are we really hoping to accomplish?

  I wish I could give it up. I'd do anything to be free of this. It's a compulsion, Tom. I cannot stop myself from doing it. There's nothing else that makes me feel like I'm really here. But I can't make a career of it, I can't se
ll it. I can't make anybody else care about what I have to say. I don't know if they're all deaf or if I'm mute, but my words do not reach them so what difference does it really make? It's not really art if I sell it anyway, not really art if I share it. People corrupt everything. I'm almost glad that I haven't published anything. It's more pure when it's only mine. I guess it will have to stay that way.

  DC

  -What's that Joanna?

  -Hm / oh / only a letter.

  -A letter?

  -Just a letter David wrote / here read for yourself.

  -Why would he still have this? / didn't he ever send it? / who's Tom?

  -Tom was David's roommate in college / and David wrote a lot of letters that he never sent.

  -Why would he do that?

  -Narcissism / ego.

  -How so?

  -Well he liked to talk but he didn't really care if anybody heard him or not for him there was no reason to send the letter it didn't really matter what Tom thought David didn't care he only wrote it to / well / I don't really know why he wrote it don't know why he kept it either / it's just the way he was.

  -There's no date on it.

  -It must have been a few months before we first met.

  -Seems pretty bleak.

  -David wasn't very happy back then / I don't know / maybe he never was.

  -What else is in that box?

  -Looks like more letters.

  -These are love letters Joanna.

  -For me?

  -I think so.

  -David never wrote me any love letters.

  -I guess he never sent them.

  -That's worse somehow.

  -Oh.

  -What is it?

  -Never mind.

  -Let me see it.

  -Joanna I don't think

  -Just give me the damn letter / can't hurt anything now the man's dead you know / no point hiding.

  Joanna Cook

  I think I'm starting to fall for you. What a fucking nightmare. I have to confess, I don't want to love you. I never wanted to fall in love with a woman like you.

  There are three pages more almost all scrawled down in his frenzied hand a catalog of her faults. She is too outspoken not quiet not reserved like the kind of women he respects the still mother-figure standing quiet behind her husband. She is too ugly not beautiful like the women he loves with their swollen tits and their bee-sting lips and their long blond hair and their slight features. She is too forward not reserved not virginal not chaste like the women he wants to violate to dominate to control she is too powerful for him or anyway she once was she is diminished now shrunken beaten he won in the end didn't he? Was that all they ever had just that breaking down? She crumples the paper in her hands she is sneering and angry and will not meet Vanessa's eyes she says that she doesn't care she doesn't give a fuck what he thought then or what he thought at any time for that matter but her eyes are damp and brimming with violent tears.

  They search through four more boxes and by the end of that forth box Joanna thinks that her head is going to burst she can't bear the conflicting emotions within her the hate the sadness the pleasure the loss she wants to shut the boxes shut the basement door does not want to see this does not want to be here what's the point anyway?

  She makes lunch for Vanessa. Only after they've finished eating do they look up at the clock and see that it's five in the evening already where did the time go they ask. Vanessa wants to borrow the car and drive into town to pick up some supplies some toiletries which she'd forgotten this and that. Joanna hands over the keys without discussion they have not talked much there is something between them now someone the bloated ghost of DC fucking Glaser. Joanna stands at the top of the basement steps there's still so much down there so many boxes so many pages they'll be another day working at least.

  She does not understand how she could have been so ignorant how she could have failed to see it failed to know the man she'd been married to for more than thirty years she supposes that she was simply too eager for it to work that she had needed it to work she had wanted love so very badly. She wants to tell the girl all about it wants to explain everything she wants to tell Vanessa how it felt when her parents died but she cannot speak not about that not now she was thirty years old when it happened when they died she was called down to the hospital morgue to identify the bodies they'd found ID but they weren't sure couldn't say for sure there wasn't much left of them her father in his cardigan sweater god he'd loved those wore them all year round she remembers when she was a little girl just a little slip of a thing her granddaddy used to say before the dementia got him she would bury her face in her father's chest any time she was afraid was sad was frightened she would bury her face in her father's warm cardigan would cry to him and his arms wrapping around her the smell of it was written into her mind and there he was on the cold table and they had stripped him mostly naked nothing but a sheet over his body lacerated and bruised and burned and she'd been unable to breathe unable to cry even she just sank against the wall gaping like a fish and she'd tried to look away from it and she'd found her mother's body next to his her mother her mother god she couldn't even think about her mother that was much too hard she looked back at her father looked at his body thinking about him when he was alive she thought of tall grass he'd hated to mow the lawn and Mom wouldn't do it the job hardly ever got done until Joanna was a teenager and they paid her to do it for them he'd used to walk barefoot would stand there with no shoes no socks feeling the grass between his toes smiling up at the sun darn nice day he would say to her darn nice and she would laugh and run around and he'd adjust his glasses and put his hands in his pockets he'd been so proud of her his child his only child his little girl you could see him bursting at the seams with pride like he wanted to run around run barefoot through the neighborhood with her up on his shoulders just shouting this is my child this is my little girl look at her isn't she beautiful isn't she smart isn't she perfect I'm so proud of her and then he was gone they were both gone and she had nothing there was nobody else in the world who was that proud of her who loved her that much how could there be and then there was David smiling at her across the cafe falling for her and she falling for him and she'd been open been raw been a wound been hungry for him enough to let herself fall in love with him even though even though even though and now it turned out he'd felt the same felt more of the same had hated her in some part of himself she couldn't understand how had they ended up together there had been good times hadn't there or was it all just a fucking delusion was she just trying to justify all the time she'd lost to him all the years given up she pitied him almost after all he was dead and she was still alive she could still move on could still have something she could fall in love she didn't need him she could be in love again so fuck you David.

  She wanders the empty house hating him missing him wanting to be rid of him god he is everywhere she takes down the pictures she takes down the accolades takes down the awards from the shelves takes down the books from the bookcase eight books the same eight books over and over in all their divergent editions and printings four copies of Life in the North the first copy the first paperback the mass market version the vanity press copy with gold-edged pages and a silky bookmark five copies of A Weakness three copies of Woodsmen and all the rest all the other five those eight books those eight books she can chart her life by them can remember the way they dominated her existence over the past thirty years while she had produced nothing and been nothing but an ancillary to David's art now he is gone and she is all that is left so really these belong to her don't they if not her than who? These belong to her these eight books. She sweeps them off the shelf she carries them away she buries them in the same ground where he is now buries them in that same earth.

  When Vanessa returns from town it is all gone but still he is here she cannot be rid of him still he is here his voice is here whispering in the corners of the rooms from the vents from the halls from the cracks beneath the door he wil
l not be exorcized so easily. Her skin crawls with fear of him and of herself and of all the wild world around her.

  Thank god her father cannot see what has become of her now thank god he cannot see who she has become.

  Woodsmen

  Naomi.

  Green eye like jade sparkling green not some dull dun swamp shade but such an arresting vermillion a color to draw you in to drown you in looking in and falling through rings of green into an inky black pool those eyes those irresistible eyes and that hair that silk blond hair like liquid like gold flowing never broken always whole a shimmering mass like a living thing caressing pale shoulders whispering to the wind with a voice all its own. Her cheeks her nose her face her skin so milky white and thin and fragile you could see the veins could see right through to subcutaneous blue her long smooth legs arched her fingers arched thin and quick the fingers of a pianist fingers made to dance across the keys her mouth so soft and warm and easy such a solemn mouth and so sweet to see her smile her breasts firm and high and so small they disappear in your hands when you hold them when you feel the wide dark nipples striking brown on her lily flesh and ripe on your mouth her eyebrow a dark line like the stroke of a paintbrush the final wisp of a stroke her vagina full-lipped redolent and crowned with curls of dark copper hair sweet smelling musky womanly scent her ear you used to nibble at teeth brushing soft skin pierced by heavy hanging jewelry which she only ever removes when she is performing. Is this all she is just a collection of parts isn't she more more than a body more than physicality? A whole?

  Naomi.

  Vanessa cannot get out of bed she lies there and watches the sun crawl skywards watches the shadows pour themselves against the wall watches the scrawl of the treeline over the pond quiver in ascending sunlight and still she lies there she cannot move she cannot free her mind it hurts it hurts so much it is difficult to breathe impossible to move only to go on existing is almost more than she can bear the pain is deep down way inside of her a boundless agony all she is is memory and hurt and she knows that she will never see again the woman she loves that word is unendurable that word never. She hears Joanna rise somewhere across the house hears the drip of the coffeemaker the hiss of food in the pan the clatter of dishes and then a silence she will not come Vanessa can't bear to see her now can't bear the the older woman's comfort and reassurance she can't remain here she needs to rise she needs to go on she is trapped here in her bed in her memory and her pain.

  She remembers the two of them walking through the door together her hand in Naomi's hand stepping cautiously over the threshold looking up at the dirty ceiling cracks running through and down the walls the almost frightening entropy present in that apartment the breakdown of order. Naomi says never mind that never mind all that I don't care about any of it because I'm here with you we're together oh fuck we're finally together and she throws her arms around you pulls you tight kisses you and you're self conscious don't want anybody to see don't want anybody to know don't want to be judged the door open behind you is like a knife in your back you pull away from her and shut it she rolls her eyes. This is it now this is our new home our home my god Vanessa we're really here we're really together oh I love you so fucking much baby and you fall back into her arms.

  She remembers wandering arm in arm falling all over each other in the tatterdemalion depths of new love in new context in new possibility they fell together into bed fell into each other thumb hooked into waistband into strap into buckle into belt-loop tugging pulling it all off undressing each other in the dusky light laughing softly smiling touching their lips together touching their fingers tip to tip unable to contain the deeper need the seriousness running beneath the need overwhelming leaving their bodies in shakes and trembles and shivers as they cling together their need wordless and immense she pushes you down and reaches her hand into your underthings her hand curves around the swell of your pubis just holding you shuffling touch a hot wet desire she puts her finger inside you you're so smooth and slick inside the pillow surrounds you a cloud to bury your head inside your body tight and arched she kisses your cheek kisses your ear whispers to you impossible words she tells you to shut your eyes she touches you you are all light all pleasure all desire you feel tears squeezing out at the corners of your eyes she brushes them away are you alright baby you look up at her look full into her eyes and you tell her that you love her you love her so much and she touches your lips and says shush baby your body is filling with light you cling to her and the world shrinks around you until there is only she.

  Vanessa remembers Naomi rising naked from the bed. You watch her through slit-shut eyes cozy on the edge of consciousness on some dreamy border of sleep with her pleasure still moving through you still rising in your bones the ghost of her fingers her tongue her thigh pressed against. Her body is pale and glistening in the light that comes down through the high window she yawns she stretches she touches her toes she twitches her nose the jeweled stud there catches the light she scratches an itch on her belly and pads out into the kitchen she calls back you hungry yet baby you just groan you cannot speak she stands there barefoot on the tile the light from the refrigerator spilling out on her her hair falling across her face she rises with a bottle of wine in her hands an expensive bottle a housewarming present from one of their friends she comes back without a glass they don't have any glasses yet she sits there on the edge of the bed and you wrap yourself around her your belly warm against the small of her back and she pops the cork and puts the bottle to her lips drinks she breathes she looks at you and you look at her the mournful curve of her sweet mouth at the rolls of her belly where her body folds upon itself when she sits the realness of her the fact of her you take the bottle and sit up beside her and you drink she touches your shoulders you give her back the bottle are you alright you ask she nods and forces a smile I'm happy Vanessa I'm so happy that we're together.

  She remembers the night standing beneath the stars standing in the street. All bound up in despair and fury hating her and hating yourself remember the arguing fighting screaming remember breaking glass you say why do you have to be like this what's wrong with you Naomi why won't you let me in and she shouting back you don't care you don't give a shit about my feelings you only care when it affects you you say that's not true Naomi you know it isn't I love you she says you don't you're selfish why do you treat me like this you say you don't know what she's talking about and she begins to cry furious tears she says that she wishes she were dead you tell her not to be dramatic she says she wishes everyone were dead you tell her to get a hold of herself she says fuck you Vanessa just go away leave me alone and you do you slam the door behind you go down the stairs and out into the street and by the time you've reached the corner the anger is gone and you're afraid you think of the scars on her arm old scars I was confused once she says and now I have you I'm all better I promise but you're afraid and you walk back walk slow at first and then faster and then running running up the stairs and back through the door and she is standing there her face streaked with tears and her golden hair in a tangle and her eyes red and she cries why did you leave me and you take her in your arms I'm sorry I'm sorry and you can't even remember what you were ever fighting about in the first place and you shut the door behind and go in with her.

  She lays in the bed and remembers Naomi.

  Eventually Joanna comes to find her and they go down together into the basement back into the dead author's boxes of memory.

  Vanessa doesn't quite know what to think. The pages she reads seem to float weightless past her she does not see them there is too much here and no point of entry this is a whole life here it is like looking inside the brain of another person and she does not like the sensation she feels like a voyeur here. She is disappointed with what she reads and what she finds feels like a haphazard mix of juvenilia and affected nihilism this is not DC Glaser this is a boy a confused creature a fragile searching nothing it was wrong to come here to wake this dead child even if the author were stil
l alive this was not him this was not who he was. Or maybe this is him this is him purely given and the books are all a lie. By the time they have come to the final box she is hardly looking at the pages before her only passing them by with scarcely a glance. She watches Joanna the older woman will not meet her eyes down here among her husband's words she seems skittish and afraid wincing at every page always expecting the worst. Vanessa begins to doubt the practicality of the whole endeavor there is no Cannibal's Prayer Bradley will be disappointed DC's fans will be disappointed the publishers will be disappointed but they will all go on regardless they will forget DC who will not go on who has already stopped everybody is forgotten eventually some day in the distant glittering future they'll forget Shakespeare and James Joyce and Homer they'll forget a writer like DC Glaser far sooner how long thirty years maybe give or take a couple decades is this all there really is? There are so many writers so many stories so many books eventually their weight will push down all the words of the past like a new growth creeping over a corpse a body that in decay will fertilize new life but eventually vanishes.

  There seems to be no order here no chronology the boxes are filled to the brim with nothing. The two women read and the day slips away time vanishes down here Vanessa gazes up at the window longing to be outside of all this to escape the cobwebbed misery Joanna makes them lunch turkey sandwiches they eat on the steps halfway between the light and the dark they hold their sandwiches gently and sit reclined like conquerors over their kingdom of paper only one last stack left and nothing here of interest. There are a few things they pulled out some essays a couple of the better shorts they made a pile of them there at the foot of the stair a dishearteningly small pile which they've decided will be sent it on to Bradley if they don't find anything better he might want to put out one of those retrospective story collections that sometimes finds its way around all the better known pieces and at the beginning a few of the author's early works ordained with criticism of the text and reductive synopsizes spilling out theories of the birth of the author's big themes and so on and so on it hardly seems worth the effort. Joanna brings her a beer and they finish their sandwiches together before descending once again into the morass.

  -Why do you think he kept all this Joanna?

  -What do you mean?

  -All this shit why keep it? / I mean it doesn't look like anybody's been down here for years seems like a waste.

  -Same reason anybody keeps anything they don't need it's just sentimentality I suppose same reason the Pharaohs buried themselves with all their treasure people like to feel that their lives had meaning.

  -But what did this mean to DC / it's just garbage isn't it? / he must have known that.

  -David valued things even things that had no worth / he was gentle that way hated to destroy anything kill anything I put out mousetraps once in our first apartment just after we'd been married there were a lot of mice there I think there was a nest of them in the walls we were always finding them chewing through cereal boxes and wires and shoeboxes all that so I put out mousetraps of course I never even gave it a second thought I didn't tell David about it anyway we were just going to bed and we heard a snapping sound David asked me what it was and I said it was probably a mousetrap he went pale I asked him to go check he wouldn't move didn't speak I got up myself and went to look there was a dead mouse cute little thing white belly little nose little feet you know I got rid of it / David was crying he wouldn't speak to me for days he couldn't bear to see it die like that it really affected him.

  -I can't believe that.

  -It is strange / he had his quirks.

  -But it's kind of beautiful isn't it?

  -I suppose it is.

  At the bottom of the stack Vanessa finds a piece somehow different from the others the paper a little more worn a little more well-used she picks it up and flips through five sheets of paper crinkled and worn she has the feeling the sense without any reason that this had once been treasured that this was something which DC had really loved once maybe when he was younger a teenager a college student once this had meant something to him she looks around the basement Joanna is going up the steps with the slim pile of stories they've decided to keep. The rest have all been returned to their boxes dusted off and returned to gather dust anew. Vanessa folds up the papers and pushes them down into her pocket she doesn't feel that she can read them now she wants to wait until dusk she doesn't know why it just seems appropriate. She goes up the steps and out of the basement feeling knowing that it is for the last time two days down there and hardly anything to show for it but those two days in darkness. She ascends the naked stair beneath the cement walls beneath the bare copper water pipes the cobwebs the dirt the earthy ruin of a part of the house left untouched and untended she shuts the door behind her and goes to her room. She puts the still folded papers beneath her pillow not sure why she is hiding them from Joanna she feels as though she is being guided by an invisible hand instructed by a silent voice maybe she is being foolish but there is a part of her which knows without doubt that there is a spirit in this house which is trying to speak which has some need which will not rest.

  Joanna and she ate dinner together. Baked salmon. Joanna says something strange

  -You expect them to be better but they're just human the pejorative human I guess he was more human than most.

  Vanessa nods mindlessly staring out the window it is a killing sun outside shines bright enough to turn your eyes blind there is no warmth in it only light cold light such unearthly light. When they've finished eating she goes to her room makes her excuses awful tired long day Joanna nods doesn't push doesn't ask and Vanessa goes she shuts the door behind her and with a sickly feeling of uneasy excitement not unlike sexual anticipation she takes the pages from under the pillow and she looks closer. Handwritten pages in DC's hand his young hand the title of the story is The Woods and it seems to be unfinished there are several corrections and changes penciled in lines crossed out scratched out obliterated all the names have been changed written over systematically the date scrawled at the top of the page reads December seventeenth nineteen-eighty so he would have been in his thirties then wouldn't he? not much older than she is now. He'd written this sometime after his first two books had been released this wasn't some relic of youth this might actually be something. She starts to read.

  The Woods

  John Lennon was dead and, try as he might, Todd couldn't quite bring himself to care. His friends were playing on the snowy baseball diamond. He sat in an empty dugout and watched them. The pitcher bent down to gather a snowball in his hands, crafting it carefully and softly in his woolen mittens, raising his leg, whipping around his arm. And the pitch! Then the swing of the bat, a burst of broken snow exploding against the wood, a whoop of jubilation as the batter begins, uselessly, to run. He kicks up snow behind him as he goes. He goes and goes.

  His Dad was taking the whole thing really hard. The Beatles had been huge for him. He'd grown up listening to them, all through his teens. Nowadays he would go sit in the den, down there in the darkness spinning records for hours: Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, all the classics of his childhood. His eyes would be red when he came up. Todd didn't like seeing that kind of thing, that wasn't how a guy's old man was supposed to behave. Todd's Dad had always been a steady and dependable guy. This just wasn't like him. Something about it really shook Todd up, and he wasn't quite sure yet why.

  Reggie Anderson hollered out across the icy ballfield. "Hey Todd, come play!"

  "Only if we play for real!" He shouted back, and lifted the ball beside him. The red thread in the scuffed white ball was like a trail of blood leading around the globe. He left the dugout and jogged around the backstop. There were little strands of ice in the chain links. Tommy had kicked it when they first got here and the whole thing jangled, bits of ice tumbling down on them like smooth glass; they'd danced away with their hands over their heads, shrieking with pleasure.

  Todd stepped up to the snow-clad plate. H
is hands gripped the bat handle so tight that it creaked. His bare knuckles were red with the cold. He stared at the pitcher. Dan Harris, a stocky kid with a wicked sidearm. Dan stared back. There was no catcher, since nobody had any pads or a mask and none of them quite had the nerve to catch without protection. The first pitch whizzed past Todd and dinged against the backstop with a weird metallic clang. It had been a lousy throw; Todd didn't even bother taking a swing. The guys in the outfield jeered at him. He flipped the bird in their direction and jogged back to retrieve the ball. Dan caught it and spit.

  Strike one.

  Todd's breath fogged before him. The neckline of his jacket itched. Most of the guys lived on his street. They'd always been friends. They'd always been together. Of course they didn't see each other quite so much now, school having started back up.

  Standing there in the snow, out there on the baseball field waiting for the pitch, Todd thought to himself that the summers they'd spent together had been some of the best times of his life. Before school, before girls, before John Lennon died. He licked his lips and felt the saliva freeze. The pitch came and he swung. He heard the crack of it like a breaking bone. He felt the reverberation rattle down the length of the bat and into his hands.

  The ball disappeared. The sky above was blank with ubiquitous cloud and the ground was just as white. The white ball vanished between the two, somewhere in all that colorlessness. Nobody knew where to look. They all gawped around in a sort of panic. They couldn't play without the ball, and it was their only ball. Todd trotted out towards first. By the time he'd rounded it and headed towards second everybody was making snowballs and hurling them at the second baseman, who was doing his best to catch them all, hoping that one of them was the real thing. Todd kept on running right past him, all the way around the bases.

  They looked for the ball together after Todd crossed home plate. They scoured the outfield for almost twenty minutes before concluding that it simply was not there. A debate started as to whether Todd could have hit it over the fence and into the woods beyond. A couple of the guys said that they thought they'd seen the ball go that way. The rest of them argued that there was no way, not Todd. No offense.

  Todd just stood by and thought about John Lennon.

  They say he'd been killed by a fan, a crazy fan. Some guy called Mark David Chapman. Todd had seen a picture of him. An ugly fat fuck. How could somebody like that have killed John Lennon? How different that creep was from that long haired guy who'd had pictures taken of himself in bed with Yoko. Todd didn't really like the Beatles. That was his Dad's music. He liked metal better, liked it fast and loud and mean. He knew a kid who'd been to a Black Sabbath concert, a kid named Jackie Owen. God, he would have given anything...

  No, the Beatles weren't for him. Even so, he didn't like to think about John Lennon being dead. In a way, it was like his own Dad had been killed. He wasn't Dad anymore, just some old man crying in the basement over his murdered hero.

  Todd wandered out to the edge of the field and looked off to the woods beyond.

  Famous people weren't supposed to die. Todd couldn't remember ever hearing about a famous person being killed. Not like that, not just shot down outside his house like that. It was so common. What was the point of being famous if you could die like that? And what good was living if becoming famous wouldn't protect you? He'd always figured that someday he would be famous himself. A famous baseball player maybe. Or an actor. He'd just assumed that someday it would be his turn. Goddamn John Lennon had changed all that. Suddenly David was wondering if maybe he was just ordinary. Just like everybody else.

  Todd brushed the snow off the top of the fence and leaned up against the cold metal rail. The trees beyond shook snow off their black limbs. He loved the woods, he thought of them as his own kingdom of childhood, all wild and ferocious and untamed. The woods were the place where boys found themselves. He'd always taken great comfort in the solitude of the woods. The guys were planning to build a treefort once the snow melted. They'd been drawing plans all winter.

  The brush at the edge of the forest was scrubby and leafless. He saw something, a touch of red in the snow. "I see the ball, you guys!" he shouted back over his shoulder. He climbed the fence, hopping right over and landing hard in the snow on the other side.

  He scrabbled to his feet and stopped a couple paces away from the bit of red. It wasn't the threads of the ball, no, this was something else. He looked closer. Could it be... blood? He felt a chill run down his spine.

  No, no, it couldn't be that. He dug in the snow. What else could it be? He looked out into the forest. It seemed gloomy and oppressive all of a sudden. In all the shadows he saw the bloated face of Mark David Chapman. He looked back over his shoulder. The guys were coming towards the edge of the field. They gravitated slowly towards the fence, moving like a gang of murderers.

  "Toss it here, Todd."

  Todd turned away. "It's not the ball." His voice shivered, must be the cold. Why was it so cold? He looked deeper into the woods. There was something there, propped up against a tree trunk like a rag doll. He stepped closer. He looked.

  The guys were all at the fence, shouting at him to find the ball already. They shook the chain links with their hands, clattering at him and hooting. They were laughing. How could they be laughing like that? Didn't they see it?

  Todd went closer. It was a woman. Her feet were bare, bloodied and scabbed and severely frostbitten. Black almost, dead flesh. Her faced was turned down, her mouth open a little. Her lips were blue. Her shirt was open and one breast hung bare, crystalline with frost. There was a bundle in her arms. There was a baby frozen in her arms.

  Todd felt faint. He reached out for a tree branch to steady himself. The branch broke and he stumbled. He wanted to puke.

  And that is where the story ends. Vanessa touches the pages the rumpled pages runs her fingers through them she feels a kind of unease. The story is clearly unfinished in the margins of the last pages there are a few notes scribbled down.

  He gets interviewed on TV. Fame. Friends get jealous? Beginning of novel or short story? His mother cuts his finger off.

  She blinks especially at that last line seemingly out of nowhere she turns back through to see if Todd's mother had been mentioned anywhere in the story it doesn't look as though she had what was DC thinking about what was it he'd been planning she wonders whatever became of the story maybe there is a longer draft somewhere an outline even or had he just given it up had his attention been drawn somewhere else what ever became of The Woods anyway? She wonders if maybe he'd adapted some of it loosely into Woodsmen the book he'd put out in eighty-two maybe this had been a sort of jumping off point had inspired that other book she tries to remember if there was anything there which might have been taken from this and can't pinpoint one it's been a long time since she last read that one. She is tempted to go find a copy and investigate but it seems that Joanna has gotten rid of all her husband's books why did she do that? what's going on there? It didn't seem as though their marriage had been particularly happy Vanessa doesn't want to pry but she is of course desperately curious she lies there in bed and ponders. She lies still for hours until the sun vanishes and the darkness of the world takes sway then she rises and walks out to the kitchen hungry and thirsty though she has no particular appetite it is a hunger which cannot be satisfied.

  The light is on in the next room. Vanessa finds a loaf of bread and eats it dry and thick in her mouth like chewing cud she doesn't eat the crust but throws it away tossed like a skeleton into the trash the light goes out and so eventually does she.

  She finds Joanna sitting there in darkness all wrapped up wound in her blanket with a cup of tea steaming in her hands she looks up at Vanessa and her eyes are glowing in the dark like a cat's eyes iridescent and terribly round terribly knowing the steam from her tea like the smoke of a shaman's fire revealing and obscuring both at once. Vanessa comes into the room Joanna points up at the ceiling there's a light there a little skylight
a square in the ceiling like a box of sky such a little window when the sun goes by overhead during the day it makes a beam of light shine search across the room always looking down always watching like the slit eye of heaven. She gestures Vanessa over and pulls her feet off the seat cushion to make room on the couch the furniture in this room is draped with old rugs ragged antiques with worn tassels and frayed patterns they smell of old life older than Joanna the smell of a generation past what is that smell that grandmotherly smell how it lingers in the nostrils Vanessa remembers her Gramdma and feels the ache of death through her bones. She sits beside Joanna.

  -I was just watching the stars / we used to come out here and watch them sometimes David and I he loved to look up / to gaze upon the heavens he would say say it just that like that false sarcasm / he was afraid of being taken seriously was always worried that people would see his true self he was afraid of being known.

  -But you did know him didn't you?

  -I thought I did.

  -Did something happen / something we found?

  -I

  -You don't have to tell me.

  -I did find something / it was something / terrible / I never thought I always knew / god of course I knew that there was a darkness in him he never hid that never even pretended to but I never thought that it could get that dark / could go so far beyond / some things are just wrong / I never thought I would find something like that.

  -What did you find Joanna?

  -A story / I guess it was a story I don't know how what maybe fantasy would be a better word / pornographic erotic what's the difference / we're such base creatures at heart men especially I don't mean to sound / I'm not saying they're worse or less worthy or that we're / I just / there is a lowness to us / as a species I mean / we're lower than animals I can't put my finger on it / men should know better they do know better we all know better but they cannot stop themselves I pity them I suppose as a gender those poor cruel brutes like children like cruel children you want to punish them but at the same time / you can't help loving them I don't mean sexually well maybe I do I don't know it's all mixed up in my head always has been I've always loved men even when I was young just a teenager you know they used to call me the slut not a slut but / the / can you believe that a little old schoolteacher like me they used to say back in high school that I would suck any boy's cock they said that I would fuck for money that I / they made jokes / exaggerated / I never felt like any of them really knew me not a one I was so desperate to know them I just wanted to share something but they would never share it back they were so shy such little boys they were so afraid of themselves I only wanted to see what was inside their minds those male minds I only ever wanted to know / there were only a few boys too I guess they were afraid they told stories and the people they told told more stories you know the way it can all snowball spin out of control / the other girls besides my friends I mean the other girls acted like they were ashamed of me / some of them jealous I don't know I wonder if maybe they thought I knew something they didn't / of course I didn't know anything didn't have any answers I just wasn't afraid to ask the questions.

  -Joanna

  -What in the world am I going on about / I'm sorry you caught me at a strange time I suppose / what gods and monsters of the night that will not show themselves under the sun, eh?

  -I don't think I know that / that's a quote?

  -It's from one of David's books / DC / a DC Glaser novel / god.

  -Which one?

  -God I don't remember maybe it wasn't ever published / maybe it was from an early draft / I can't keep it straight anymore what people know what I know what's out there what's just in here / hell maybe I wrote it it sounds like the sort of thing I might write.

  -Your writing / will you tell me about it?

  -My writing / was a / well it was a bit of a joke / I never had any patience for the craft / no I suppose that's not true / it wasn't a lack of patience / a lack of courage maybe I couldn't stand to hear anybody say / couldn't bear to be told that I wasn't good enough.

  -Is that true?

  -True enough / I must admit that I always admired David a great deal for that / it was hard for him he never had thick skin about it those stories were his children his only children / did you know he wanted children? wanted them more than anything but I couldn't give them to him or he couldn't give them to me no point placing blame pointing fingers now / anyway / he hated to see anything bad about his writing / he was so shy at first so ashamed of it that he couldn't disagree with any criticism not even the stuff that was obviously bullshit he just couldn't separate himself from it it hurt him he sought out the hurt he thrived on it it made him angry and he always wrote best when he was angry such a male thing to do get angry and retreat to that place that place of control false control / he was never above willful self-deceit.

  -Is that the little dipper?

  -The stars look very bright tonight.

  -Or is it Cassiopeia?

  -I honestly don't know / the stars are a mystery to me Vanessa.

  -Aren't they.

  -I sorry going on about men like that I forget sometimes what you are / no / forgive me that came out badly.

  -Not what I am / who I am.

  -You're right / who you are / it feels unfair sometimes that there are so many lives which I will never know / never know what it feels like to be a man to be a lesbian to live in another place another time to be something else seems unfair somehow that we have only the one life / I remember thinking about that when I was a young girl / eighteen I guess I probably didn't think I was especially young probably felt pretty old at the time / I remember thinking something like that and deciding that I was going to be an actress or a writer / I was going to live other lives.

  -And?

  -What do you mean? / and? / and here I am this is it my one self there are no others / I let it all fall by the wayside I guess you know how that can happen you're trying and it's so hard and there's no success it seems some times that there is no success for anybody not anybody real and then I met David I don't know it all fell away I didn't hold on tight enough and now I have none of it left.

  -You can always pick it up again Joanna there's nothing stopping you from writing.

  -Nothing except myself / no I couldn't do that / sometimes life just passes by / you lose your chances / what do I have left to say? / writing is a young person's game I don't have anything to say.

  -That's not true.

  -You know / I'm frightened of being old / I've never known anyone who grew old / I told you my parents died in an accident / I hadn't seen my grandparents for years when they passed away / and now David / I've never watched somebody grow old not somebody I've loved and now I am so afraid / I have no reference point.

  What are you talking about?

  -Look at me Vanessa I'm not getting any younger / huh / just the opposite / my father-in-law has pretty advanced dementia it was a hard thing for David to go through / he always had a rough relationship with his father he was always putting off reconciliation he would always say that he'd fix it next year next time you know how it goes and then of course it was too late he went to visit his father once and when he came back he could hardly speak not for days eventually he told me about it / he got there and his father did not recognize him he kept asking for his son the little boy who had been his child only yesterday now all grown up a sixty year-old-man / imagine that one day you open your eyes and your child has become an old man this world is revolting what's the point of going on if it can all be wiped out all just vanish decades of your life all your relationships what is the point of being alive if we're going to die I honestly don't understand / David sat there beside his father who did not recognize him and he tried to make conversation the old man pissed his pants didn't even realize it just sat there in his sadness soaking in cooling urine David told me later that he wanted to strangle him not because he wanted to hurt him just because he knew that it was what his father his true father would have wa
nted / for David the worst part the most horrible aspect of the whole thing he never got to hear his father forgive him for everything never got to hear him apologize either / David apologized for everything and that old man that stranger just looked confused and asked what the hell he was talking about.

  -It's starting to snow isn't that strange isn't that odd can you believe that snow in spring.

  -There is no spring not really / we're just stumbling from winter to winter / every time the seasons turn I feel afraid I'm always thinking that this is it this will be my last autumn my last summer my very last one / once you get to a certain age pass a certain threshold / there is a time in everybody's life a twilight time an awareness of an ending and everything becomes so miserably autumnal.

  -This is a terrible place Joanna we shouldn't be here / there are spirits in this house.

  -I don't know what you're talking about.

  -Can't you feel it? / his presence.

  -You want to give up? / leave me here?

  -I want us to / I can't / we can't / I don't know.

  -We'll go to his office at the school tomorrow / see what we can find there.

  -Are you sure?

  -We've started this Vanessa we have to see it through no matter what is exhumed in the process don't you agree?

  -Alright.

  -I want to ask about you though you seem / distant.

  -Do I?

  -What are you running from Vanessa / what happened to you?

  -Not yet Joanna / I can't talk about that yet I have to think more.

  Joanna Glaser nods she reaches over and puts her arm around Vanessa she draws the younger woman close lays her head down in her lap. Vanessa can feel tears gathering in her eyes she tries to blink them away to banish them Joanna shushes her brushes back her hair wipes the tears from her cheeks touches her god it feels so good to be touched again to be in contact with another human to feel those hands on her face she shuts her eyes and Joanna holds her almost the way Naomi once had long ago and would never again.

  Eros

  They step out of the car and hold their hands up to the sun subterranean creatures squinting beneath the false glare the buildings of the university gleam an angry gleam their long imposing faces those of ancient gods idols wrought in earth and stone and glass and suspended upon bones of iron. The parking lot is emptied out by now all the students have returned home gone back to their parents crawling back with whatever their scraps of stolen knowledge jealous and selfish and taciturn and now the campus is left a ghost town and in all the rooms echoing the stain of language. This place is an affront to god knowledge is vapor in the mind she feels at home here feels liberated. Joanna locks the car door they cross the parking lot together. She feels like a survivor last living of the air-crash or drifting on white swells as the ocean liner goes prow up into the sea.

  David guest lectured here a few years after his first book came out. He fit in here. They invited him back so many times that he eventually found himself folded in and part of the family they invited him to teach an independent study then a class then another and six years later he was a full member of the teaching staff writer-in-residence they called him he taught maybe two sections a semester only higher level courses. Joanna understood that some of the others had been resentful but that was the privilege of success it let you step over the barriers skip past the requirements let you slip on by. She suspected sometimes that David liked teaching more than he'd ever liked writing he was always taking students out to lunch taking his classes to art shows and readings only tangentially related to his subject inviting them to his home sometimes for private conferences he read their writing and he used all his connections in the publishing world he did everything for those he deemed worthy and nearly everyone was in his eyes worthy anyone who put themselves under his tutelage he protected and applauded anyone willing to let him take a hand. They loved him for it. Years after graduating they would still turn up at the house Joanna would open the door to some fresh-faced ex-student and be expected to stand aside and let them in to cook for them to put them up in the guest bedroom if necessary. Their home became a kind of clubhouse the DC Glaser writer's club it made her skin crawl sometimes the way they'd looked at her putting her in a place in what they thought her place should be she was the wife just the wife unworthy of attention or notice a cog a servant David treated her that way and they watched like children they treated her the same and she went along with it. Why hadn't she fought? She lacked the fighter's spirit perhaps. She should have fought. She did not understand herself at all.

  -How long did DC teach here?

  -Must have been twenty-five years.

  -Did he like it?

  -He loved it.

  -Really? / I wouldn't have thought he was the type.

  -David always loved his students.

  They go up the steps onto the campus green trees flowered in the sunlight laying dappled shadows on the cut grass there is a smell in the air of life and death fertilization and growth.

  The trouble had started about ten years ago at least that was when it had become trouble who could say how long it had been going on before that. There's an edge of discomfort being back on campus again it brings back so many dark memories the accusations the cold looks she'd stopped coming here a long time ago. Anyway she tries not to believe it not any of it there is a lot she would believe of David but not that something like that was beyond him she is sure of it she knew him at least that well he wouldn't have done those things. This is what she has to tell herself.

  The girl had come to their house years after it was all over years after the hearings and the recriminations and the arguments had all died down all gone silent and festering beneath the surface. Sandy Reynolds that was her name. Joanna had opened the door and it took her a moment to recognize the young woman standing there her long blond hair and her striking blue eyes and her cream white skin her soft features her jangling bracelets and low earrings her little blue car in the driveway and one stud in her nostril her long nails painted black her clothes bright and loose like wisps of silk hung on her slim body her breasts full and heavy in the heat her shorts hardly halfway down the thigh and she'd looked at Joanna with a kind of buried disgust a revulsion that had no malice and no interest a simple dismissal a look which said I have no time for you you cannot hurt me cannot touch me you are meaningless you are beneath me it was a look that made Joanna's blood thrum and pulse in her ears. I'm looking for the professor Sandy said. Joanna asked what her name was not wanting to believe that she would come here. I just want to apologize she said and Joanna tried to slam shut the door but the girl caught it with her hand was surprisingly strong had at least four inches on Joanna. Leave us alone haven't you done enough damage already Joanna hissed hating what the girl was what she represented hating her now that she saw her again and could remember again how much she'd envied the girl wished she could have looked like that girl that goddess not her dowdy fifty-year-old self and that doubt that self disgust only made her angrier and then the girl said had the audacity to say get out of my way and at the end of that those five words are another two hanging there unspoken old woman get out of my way old woman like Joanna was nothing meant nothing and old women are worthless look at me crone stand out of my way bow and scrape to youth. And all your fears rise. That you are that ugly that useless that she is better than you. That maybe he did do something or at least he wanted to that he wants her and does not want you that your love is not good enough love is never enough sex is never enough what you need is this body and you cannot ever get it can never go back now old woman get out of my way. Stay away from us you nasty little cunt Joanna said and somewhere inside the hate the blazing fury there is a hard quiet knot of fear not a fear of the girl but a fear of what the girl has made of you that is not your word cunt you do not use that that's a DC Glaser word you once asked him please don't use it and he frowned and he asked you what you were talking about he never said that and you said I know you don't
say it I don't want you to write it don't use it in your books and of course he didn't stop using it in the books only stopped caring what you thought of them and now you're using it on this girl and why? maybe she deserves it maybe she is that awful but there is more to the world you know than who is good and who is not there is a community a culture a sisterhood all this is in your mind but the fury buries it pushes the knot down into your stomach where it will remain always you will always remember it and regret it that you said that but there is nothing to be done you have only fallen a little further in your own estimation and it eats you away piece by piece. David is attracted to the sound like a moth to light and comes frowning sees Sandy. He is cold and cautious but not angry not hateful Joanna was confused by that if anybody in the world should hate Sandy Reynolds than it should be David shouldn't it? He invites her in and talks down your protest don't worry honey it's fine he says dismissive and arrogant and there is nothing you can do but seethe and step aside nothing to do but get out of the way old woman. The girl comes and it seems for a moment as though David is going to embrace her he looks at you and there is something in his face you know that there is something hidden and malicious you know his face that well he shakes the girl's hand instead and you make a sound a hissing a sound of anger and frustration and hurt and you drift away because there is no place for you here you cannot bear to remain here and witness this. Joanna moved away and David said that he would take Sandy out to lunch. They could talk. Joanna's thoughts were crawling on her skin when the door shuts behind them and the girl gets into David's car. They came back three hours later Joanna heard the girl's car start and then she was gone and never came back again David came in with a bundle of papers and a sour look on his face his hair rumpled and his face flush and he went to his study. He came out after dark and showered he would not touch you when you joined him in bed only turned over and grunted and Joanna cried herself to sleep not for the first time. The whole thing had made her feel weak and inferior. The whole thing had been an insult to her from start to finish it was only made more insulting by the fact that it had not been meant as one that in fact her feelings had been in the grand scheme irrelevant to David.

  Coming here back to this school brings it all flooding back memories and questions. Were there others before others who did not complain or accuse? How many? Joanna sees betrayal in every shadow in every shrub she sees disappointment she does not like this beautiful place after all does not feel so at home after all.

  Vanessa doesn't seem to feel the oppression of the university she walks bold and clear-headed down the pathways her arms loose her chin high her eyes flicking this way and that. They cross the campus and enter the faculty building. Stepping out of the sunlight and into that building is like dying a little. They see a couple kissing in the stairwell him pressing her up against the wall and she twisting his shirt in her fingers one leg lifted against his thigh her skirt in his hands her arms around his bulk and their lips engaged they tear themselves away when they see Joanna and Vanessa coming and they laugh and he takes her hands and they run off they are too old she thinks and too young who are they and how have they found their way here? Vanessa smiles after with a kind of sadness in her composed face. Joanna wonders again what it was happened to the other woman a breakup but there must be more to the story than that there has to be doesn't there? every relationship is a story even the most boring couple has a story to tell you just have to dig deep enough. Joanna wants to peel away the younger woman's fear wants to see what is there at the heart of it all Vanessa has a lot of love inside her that is so plain you can tell that just looking at her it streams from her face. Two weeks ago Joanna was sure that her life would never change and look how fast it has all slipped away her husband dead her house empty and here is this beautiful girl stumbling into her life sleeping in the bed just across from her own room. Is she crazy is she that desperate and for what a return to her youth maybe? Joanna can see all the possibilities all the various reasons which might be motivating her and it does little to help her truly understand certainly does nothing to banish the lingering desire.

  They go up the stairs towards David's office and as they walk Vanessa speaks.

  -I never liked college you know I thought I would but it just never / I didn't ever feel like I was welcome there you know what I mean I always felt like an intruder it seemed like everybody belonged there more than me every time I went to a new class it was so nerve wracking / don't laugh I'm serious it was traumatic! / I'd go in and I never knew anybody they all seemed to know each other maybe they just acted that way some people have an easy way about them I never did it takes me a long time to make friends / I was never comfortable until the end of the semester and then the class was over and it would always be new people by next year / there was good stuff though I liked the atmosphere being there around those people I just wished that I could have been somebody else you know what I mean? / I wished that I could have been one of them but I could never figure out a way to do it.

  -That sounds awful.

  -Maybe / what about you? / you went to school didn't you?

  -Yes.

  -What did you study?

  -God I don't even remember and it was so long ago I never had a career you know never had the chance.

  -Hm / I majored in English.

  -English?

  -Don't sound so surprised / I'm a book dork at heart / how do you think I ended up working for DC?

  -What were you planning to do / teach?

  -No no way not teaching I could never do that never wanted to / I wanted to / ah / it's embarrassing.

  -You can tell me.

  -I wanted to write / it's stupid I know I mean it was just a / dream I guess I thought I could do it everybody has a dream job right kids who want to be astronauts or marine biologists or whatever well I'm a dork so I wanted to be a writer / dumb.

  -It isn't dumb / why'd you give it up?

  -I was no good at it / that's what happens when you try and live your dream you end up making a fool of yourself / how did we ever get talking about this it's depressing.

  -What made you think you couldn't do it? / you read those letters my husband wrote didn't you? / everybody doubts sometimes especially artists.

  -Well / I'm not DC Glaser.

  -Neither was he.

  Joanna opens the office door. They go inside.

  She looks around but she doesn't really see what is inside the room all the books and papers and plaques and photos and knickknacks doesn't really see the mug full of chewed pen caps or the articles and poems taped on the door around the nameplate 306 Prof. David Glaser. She can smell him and the smell so strong and so familiar in such an unfamiliar place sets her back blots out all other senses leaves her staggering and all the memories sweep through afresh that he had loved her that he had turned away from her that he had forgotten her that he had died all of it all their lives together rushing back just as it has done so many times in these days since she found him crumpled at his desk in the study and she'd hoped that it would hurt a little less each time but the opposite seems to be true it hurts more the void is larger and emptier and aches more and it feels like it is just going to get worse and worse until it swallows her up god she cannot bear it to have lost him like that lost him over and over it seems sometimes that the past two decades have been a series of loses in sequence feeling him slip through her fingers a little further washed a little further out to sea she hates to think it does not want to admit it but in some ways she can only be glad that he died and of course she hates herself for thinking such a thing. And the smell of him is like a weight a heavy odor she can't quite identify there are images and sensations associated with that scent all tangled up in her memory of him coffee beans laundry brought in out of the rain broad hands caressing her bare thigh seared meat smoky and tender mothballed sweaters ink-stained fingertips musty old paper like the comforting smell of a treasured childhood book. All those things were David weren't they? and that smell wa
s once his own.

  Vanessa is touching the books on his shelf turning over papers on his desk she does not seem aware of it of the olfactory presence in the room she flutters oblivious through Joanna's memories. Joanna has the absurd feeling that she should stop the other woman should pull her back should shout should drag her out into the hall she almost can not breathe the feeling is so strong the feeling that she must not disturb any of David's things because he won't be able to find anything when he comes back. She wants to cry or scream or better yet to just get beyond it all can't I just forget him please is that too much to ask? I can't go on like this. She asks the girl a question.

  -What sort of things did you write?

  -Hm?

  -In college / or before college / for yourself / what did you write?

  -Oh I don't know.

  -Sure you do.

  -Come on Joanna that's all in the past now / look at this what is this?

  -Just more of David's scraps he was always scribbling down notes / I want to talk about you.

  -I can hardly read a word of this.

  -He used to complain that his hands couldn't keep up with his brain / the ideas came too fast / what did you write about?

  -I / well / it's sort of embarrassing.

  -Oh please just tell me.

  -I wrote fantasy.

  -You mean erotica?

  -Jeez no nothing like that / fantasy / like about / you know far away kingdoms and fairy tales and / oh god that sounds so stupid.

  -It sounds beautiful / I wish I could read it.

  -Believe me you don't / anyway I didn't save anything / burned it all after graduation / had a little fire in this park off the highway on my way home.

  -That's too bad / you might have surprised yourself.

  -How so?

  -You might have been better than you thought.

  -Let's just focus on this now / alright?

  -If you like.

  -Guess it's mostly just old papers school papers I mean there's not a lot of personal writing here.

  -Check the desk drawer.

  -Okay / this feel so invasive / I feel like I'm committing a crime.

  -Grave robbing / never mind we're not the first.

  -That's funny / I've been meaning to ask you Joanna.

  -Yes?

  -What are we going to do? I mean what are / you / going to do / if we find something / like a book of DC's.

  -You mean a real book?

  -Yeah a finished book or close to it.

  -Is that what we're looking for?

  -Bradley seems to think that there's one / a new one.

  -The Cannibal's Prayer?

  -You know?

  -I knew that he was working on a book by that title.

  -Did he finish it?

  -We / we didn't talk so much / about that kind of thing.

  -Well what would you do?

  -Bradley wants to publish I take it? / one last drop of blood from the stone.

  -Joanna I

  -No don't feel guilty / I know why you're here I've known all along of course we both knew that / I understand / I accept it / and regardless of whatever I think it's probably what David would have wanted.

  -So you'd go ahead with publishing it?

  -If we found it / it all depends on how finished the book is you know David he was awful particular about his books.

  -I understand.

  -I won't have Bradley bringing some hotshot hack in to finish an underwritten rough draft just to make a quick buck on David's name / after all that's my job now I'm supposed to protect his legacy his fucking legacy christ I'll never be rid of him will I?

  -Joanna?

  -Never mind / anything there in the drawer?

  -Uh / more papers old syllabuses / is it syllabi? / oh and a notebook.

  -Let me see that.

  -This?

  -Yes that / let me see it.

  -Joanna? / where are you going?

  -Just a moment / I'll be back.

  Joanna shuts the office door behind her. Her heart is racing having spiked in her chest the moment Vanessa brought out the black notebook the same kind of black notebook that David had been writing in when he died the exact same kind she might have thought it was the same if she hadn't burned the other herself. She feels a kind of terror rising inside her rising up to her throat she feels tears gathering in the corners of her eyes she does not want to know what is inside here doesn't want to find out any more about her husband isn't it enough that he is dead that he had ignored her for twenty years that he had treated her that way isn't it enough? Why does she have to find out these things about him now? She clutches the book to her chest to her belly to her stomach it is a thing of the gut a thing she senses down there twisting churning an awful feeling that makes her feel small and young and afraid again that feeling which always takes her back to the worst times of her life waiting for her father to come home and punish her for some infraction a broken vase or a curse-word spoken waiting for her boyfriend to notice that she is five days late and she isn't sure she doesn't know and what is going to happen to her she's only nineteen not old enough no not even close to old enough for that waiting for David the night before the wedding wondering if she is doing the right thing if she is going to regret this if she is good enough for him if she will make him happy to waiting to find out about the college's investigation to hear what it is her husband has done with this girl this child this student it is that inescapable dread which twists down there way inside that fills you up and forces out all other things all emotions all joy turned sour and all pleasure turned rank it is the essential unease so unbearable it drives you eventually into the arms of the horrible thing only so that it will at last be over with done and gone.

  There are footsteps on the stairs. Someone is coming. For a horrible moment she wonders if it might be if it could be him could be David here he comes what will he say when he finds her here disturbing his office going through his things learning all his secrets will he be angry with her? she has always been afraid of his anger and afraid of the part of her self which fears she wants to be brave wants to be iron wants to not give a fuck.

  The door at the stairs opens and he comes out not David not her David a younger David he has that same touch of male madness in his eye that same cocky smile slipped on as soon as he notices her and hopes to hide his fear he has that same wolfish animal nature she recognizes his face but has no name to put to it. Just another young English teacher another would be wunderkind another writer another dweller of the darkened room eyes red from straining at cramped words endlessly spilled out. David never got along with any of the young teachers he felt like they were challenging him. He was like some mad old king nervous on the throne always peering into the shadows for betrayers and poisoners like one of Shakespeare's paranoid monarchs. He kept them all at arm's length and they resented him for it he became very protective of his writing was always afraid of having it stolen and passed off as another's work he was terrified of that. She had not yet told Vanessa but he had taken to hiding his writings secreting them away in the oddest nooks and crannies. And that is why they're looking in the basement and in his office here and why they might very well turn the whole house upside down after because there was no telling where that book if there is in fact a book could have got to they may never actually find it. The young teacher comes towards her looks her up and down she feels toothless and dismissed as he takes her in he leans against the wall cocks his head strokes his bristled cheek and speaks.

  -I know you don't I?

  -Not even a little bit.

  -You're the wife aren't you?

  -Excuse me?

  -Glaser / that's his name on the door there / you're the wife / you probably don't remember me.

  -Have you done anything worth remembering?

  -Cute.

  -Is it?

  -What do you have there?

  -Something of my husband's.

  -I suppose I should offer my condole
nces.

  -I suppose that depends on whether or not you're sorry he's dead.

  -I actually am. Are you?

  -What's your name?

  -Does it matter?

  -Not really.

  -Would you mind if I took a look at that?

  -Yes / why would you want to?

  -No reason.

  -Than I don't see any reason to give it to you.

  -You have a nice day Mrs Glaser.

  -Goodbye.

  She watches him go on down the hall and into his office she determinedly avoids looking at the name on his door she contemplates going back inside to rejoin Vanessa but something stops her she tucks the black notebook under her arm and she goes out the door at the far end of the hall onto the terrace and sits on a wide stone wall sits there and her body remembers being young laying in campus grass reading Anne Sexton or Jack Kerouac and watching the muscular young men cross the green bold and bare-chested and flashing their clear smiles. She opens the notebook and starts to read.

  The Professor lay there on the starched motel bed, perfectly still on his back as he watched the young woman undressing in the dark. She stripped with the clumsy sensuality of a girl intimidating sex, a girl who had only ever seen it or read about it and never done it. Never done it this way, at least. She was like a child, gawky and frisky and eager, licking her lips as she slid her thong panties slowly down the pale length of her slender thighs, wisps of silky material slipping down to fall about her ankles. He looked at the dark triangle of shadow where her legs met. There was a downy stripe of brown-blonde hair there, carefully sculpted and maintained. He watched the way her body moved, twisting as she reached back to unhook her brassier. He felt himself twitch with excitement.

  This was what it meant to be alive. Sex was life. The Professor's mind - that scrupulously ordered miasma, fed and nursed to a bloated web of a thing - fell right apart and reverted back to primitive animation, to the instinctual flickering of neurons that called out desperately for semblance in the white heat oblivion of sex, of need. He pulled himself up and reached for her, clutching her lithe body in his corpulent embrace. She was such a waif of a thing, he could feel her right through to her avian bones. She tumbled willingly into his clutches and the two of them collapsed laughing onto the bed.

  Their laughter was the mixture of delight and disgust, brought on in equal parts by the lust and revulsion which they felt for each other and for the act to which they were now committing themselves. She rocked her tight little body furiously atop his bloated old corpse, plunging her wet cunt again and again onto the hard little wrinkle of his prick. She yelped like a coyote when she came, and slapped his chin with her long blond hair when her head started to whip about, lolling at the neck as though the bones were broken, propelled by relentless machinery.

  She climbed off him as soon as she'd finished, leaving him hard and aching with need. Her body glistened with sweat. The smell of her fuck was hot in the stifled closeness of the hotel room. She grinned at him. "You screw pretty good, Professor."

  He grunted back with throaty and plaintive desperation.

  She laughed and tossed her hair and stepped lightly into the shower. She didn't bother to close the door, didn't even draw the curtain. Water splashed out on the tile floor.

  He struggled up from the bed, launching his corporeal bulk from the sagging mattress. His hard-on raged, pulsing like turn lights blinking behind a wiper whipped windshield.

  He stood in the bathroom doorway, his bulk filling that space across the frame. He felt his mouth twitch. "Is that it?" he groaned.

  His student laughed. "What else is there Daddy-O?"

  "I want to cum," he said. That was how desperate he had become, the depth of his erotic inarticulation. There was nothing he could do but beg.

  She sensed the pitiful edge of his condition, and she laughed again. "So what?"

  "Fuck me."

  "I already fucked you, Professor."

  "I want to cum in your pussy."

  Her laugh had an airy quality which he found tremendously maddening. "I don't think so, Professor."

  "Suck on it."

  "You're sickening."

  "You fucking brat. Let me jerk off on your face."

  "You twisted old shit."

  "I'm going to make you swallow my shit, you little cunt."

  "Jerk off on my toes."

  She sat there on the edge of the tub and slid out one perfect little foot. She spread the toes wide and licked her lips.

  The Professor was breathing hard. He lowered himself down onto the tile. His knees began at once to ache. He grasped his cock and began twisting it violently in his fist, yanking the withered skin furiously over the bulbous head - so dark a purple it was almost black. He felt his face turning hot and red.

  Her toes tapped impatiently on the floor. Drops of clean water rolled down her sudsy legs. "I'm going to make you regret this, you know."

  He growled wordlessly.

  She lifted her foot, caressing the fleshy underside of his thigh. "I'm going to tell everybody that you took advantage of me. I'm going to make sure you lose your job." She stood up, swaying in front of him, a tantalizing lotus flower of a girl.

  He was lost in the abyss of his desire. His teeth snapped at her stiff little nipples. He hardly heard her.

  "I'm going to tell your wife that you fucked me. I'm going to tell her how you begged me."

  An unearthly moan gurgled out of his strangled throat.

  She clutched his face in her hands. She was such a little thing. He felt like he could swallow her in the bulk of himself. She turned his face up to hers and let a thin strand of saliva slid out into his panting mouth.

  His breath was ragged in his throat. He was weeping with desperation. He could feel it, the verge of his orgasm, not so far off now. He could not bear it here, so close. He wanted to die, to die that small death, to be free of this.

  His cum fell on her perfect foot. Threads of pearly mucus spanned the gaps between her spread toes.

  She put her weight against him and he was too weak to remain upright. He collapsed, his body twitching with post-coital shudders. He wallowed in his pleasure, a thread of warm spit falling from his gaped mouth.

  The Professor's student laughed and shook off her foot. She stepped back into the shower and drew the curtain against him with a metallic rasp. In that last moment before her face vanished, it came to the Professor that she looked almost exactly like his mother once had, lifetimes ago in the flower of her distant youth. He reached up, scrabbling with his fingernails at the slick curtain.

  And on it goes on for pages until Joanna can bear to read not a word more. The story ends with the scratch marks of a pen gone dry and aborting with sudden indifference the threads of thought.

  Joanna feels a harsh bile rising in her throat that burning pain of disgust and sickness lingering in the back of the mouth. She cannot bear to think she flips through the pages of the black notebook blank or otherwise searching for a reference to time to some date to an anchor somewhere in the slurry of filth which will allow her to place a context upon it though of course she finds no such entry-point only the endless free-floating revulsion. She shuts the notebook and tosses it down to the walk she cannot bear to touch it the pages the very cover feel slick and foul to her. She touches her face and finds tears. She does not want to cry not for this not over him if he were alive she would have killed him she knows what this means what else could it mean? Even if he hadn't actually done the thing he had at least wanted to she is sure of that now she only read the first few pages but it is clear that the next eighty pages of the notebook held more of the same and she recognizes the population between the black covers nameless though they may be. He'd been in love with that girl. Sandy Reynolds. Who had accused him of forcing her to do things threatening to fail her if she didn't do things for him degrading helpless things how much of that was true? He'd been in love with her. But it was worse than love she could have accepted him fall
ing in love this was not love there is something so perverse about it something so beyond. She has always been fond of sex of pornography even erotica whatever you wanted to call it the semantics of it do not matter to her but this is not pornography this is not sex it is something else this is degradation it is pain it is a perversion of love it is hate had David even been capable of love?

  Vanessa comes out onto the terrace. She picks up the notebook and turns it over in her hands but does not open it she seems able to sense its content. They do not speak another word to each other Vanessa takes Joanna in her arms and the two of them walk back to the car. They drive the long and winding way back to the house and Vanessa wipes the tears from the older woman's cheeks. Joanna takes her by the hand and leads her down the hall to the bedroom where she had slept for the last four decades or so the bed which she had shared with her husband where they had done so much together all turned now to ash and mud swept away on a flood tide.

  Joanna falls into that bed into the arms of the younger woman they cling to each other under the cleansing descent of a pure darkness and in that place that mausoleum they are alive so terribly alive.

  The Mountain and God

  She remembers walking down a narrow stair holding a greasy rail in one hand descending into the red velvet darkness of the theater the cult theater there are posters for Plan 9 and Eraserhead John Waters movies imported anime Troma flicks Roger Corman and Russ Myers exploitation The Holy Mountain and Deep Throat on one wall Cassavetes on the other it's a dreadful assemblage of high art and pornographic sleaze both driven to such an extreme that it's hard sometimes to tell one from the other it's a toxic dump of film too acidic for the city at large. There are bloody condoms on the bathroom floor trash strewn in the corners you don't touch the door knobs here push them open with your hip hands held high as a robbery. All along the hallway are the runes of passing dead everything from lover's initials two or three innocuous letters to paranoiac screeds to lonely profanities devoid of context it's all carved gorged into the soft walls with a scrabbled desperation a need to leave a mark on the world she wonders if the impulse is so different from that of the filmmaker's whose work is shown here to this crowd they're diverse to say the least an odd mix of film enthusiasts come for the underground or foreign cinema and junkies come to shoot up in the back row where they can lay unmolested all day long all day long as long as they have a ticket they lay there blissed out before the almighty screen. There's a thriving flesh trade in and around the theater chicks and fags draping their serpentine bodies crack-thin with cheekbones high and empty eyes cigarettes crooked in long androgynous fingers. She is here with a woman another student she met at an outdoor protest now years later she does not remember the woman's name only her blocky mannish figure and square crew-cut and full sensual mouth and flat black eyes. They came here to see something else but all that was playing is this movie called Another Mountain looks kind of slick for this place way more commercial than most of what plays here and the student wasn't really into it. Vanessa shrugged her shoulders and said why not but something about the title about the poster has caught her attention. Fifteen minutes into the movie the student tried to kiss Vanessa. Forty-five minutes into the film the student tried to put her hand down the front of Vanessa's pants. Vanessa brushed her off both times and by the time the credits were rolling at the end of the film Vanessa was alone in the theater the student had given up and left and Vanessa had not even noticed she could not have noticed she was not in that theater she was simply not there she was in another world entire. She saw in the credits those words those simple half-dozen words based on the novel by DC Glaser and walking home dizzy and drained through the half-dark to her mordant dorm halfway there she saw his name again in the window of a tawdry bookstore and stepped inside just as the owner an owlish old man with a thin neck and a wispy body was flipping the sign on the door she bought the book and carried it home floating almost on the promise of it desperate to pour herself again into that world.

  This is the misery of the city. The city the closest thing to a god a crumbling affection a desperate paternity a creation a space teeming and eradicated paved over dug up built up dissolving like broken molecules under the microscope of time. The city is filth. The city is everything. The city grows up around us black and oily and sick immense and grotesque and inescapable once the city is within you it does not go away the noise of the city reverberates forever in the inner ear the silence of the world becomes anathema becomes fearful and the shrill groan of that dying being becomes comforting. The city is a god.

  She wakes in an empty bed in an empty room in an empty part of the world and the silence is crushing overwhelming unbearable she rises on her elbows her clothes are draped on the chair like a shed skin putting them on again feels like crawling into a dead thing feels dirty the sun is red in the eastern sky a baleful glower across the shining water across the dun earth and the tall grass as it breaks against a hard wind. She finds Joanna sitting at the table she sits down there across from her and they two look at each other not speaking. Vanessa gets a cup of coffee and holds it wrapped in her two hands watching the cream swirl as she listens to the woman begin at last to speak.

  -I want to write something.

  -Like what?

  -I don't know yet / no that's not true I know / I've always known.

  -How do you mean?

  -It's been inside me for so long.

  Vanessa gets up she feels sleepy she walks around the table her feet shuffling on the wood floor see the way the grain swirls and remembers that this was once a living thing a growing thing webbed on the world she bends down and kisses Joanna softly on the cheek her cheek dry as naked paper waiting for an inscription and the mark of her lips shows there for only a moment Joanna watches her go a look in her eyes which Vanessa cannot but guess at. She walks outside cradling her coffee swaying while the wind whips her hair across her face she walks out on the soft spring ground her bare feet sinking in the wet grass the wet dirt the soft earth she walks out to the muddy edge of the lake and looks over the water.

  She feels sometimes like there is no future that she does not belong in the world which is stretching out before her she feels old before her time misplaced in her days and all the world marches on how can they live this way? these people these confounding hordes what drives them which will not her? She thinks about books. Books books what future is there for books? those dying books those dusty books those old books. She loves books the touch the scent the fact of them the presence she opens a book and she is a child again reading in dim light transported drawn in a magic thing a beauty that aches and hurts all great love hurts gets right there down into the soul to twist. She thinks of children they don't read anymore they don't need to why should they? All the world is falling away and rising again over and over forever rising and falling like a tide she knows she understands she accepts but knowing understanding accepting does not ease the pain of loss nor of watching something loved and beautiful wither.

  They do not need books. We are clinging to a dead thing. They will not miss us when we are gone. When they no longer remember they will not feel an unexplained emptiness they do not need us. Set me afire do not read another line not another word tear out the page and burn it scatter the ash empty the shells escape while you can do not linger too long do not risk falling in love child I am older and you are so young still.

  She loved that book of his read it again and again but always the film was in the back of her mind a nervous tickle she could never forget that she had come to the book by way of an adaptation it felt like a failure a slur against her an admission of weakness she let on to her classmates that she had loved the book long before the film existed scoffed along with them at the audacity of movies listened with them as entranced as they to the rapture with which their professor expounded upon the written word the book the novel that sacred thing and she loved it as well as they she was no less devoted. And yet.

  When she goes back in
side Joanna is scribbling away jotting down notes on the back of a page off the top of the stack they'd brought from DC's office all the stuff they'd gone over already. Vanessa says that she will be returning to the college to keep searching there and Joanna just nods and frowns at the page. She asks questions tosses out ideas nods and writes she writes. Vanessa leaves her there.

  She returns to the college alone.

  The light on the empty campus is nuclear gray the wind rattling through the high buildings across the pathways through the trees and the water lays still and inert in pools of black scum. Benches and tables empty grown with moss dead leaves blown across the sidewalks thin green vines winding up through the diamonds of a chain-link fence. She is alone in this world a wandering afterthought an image.

  The first time she met DC Glaser years ago long before she took the job as his assistant long before he would remember her she met him at a book signing in the city. It was in one of those enormous book chains with a coffee-shop in the corner and dozens upon dozens of shelves stacked with books she remembers walking into that store and thinking to herself that she could never in the whole of her life read all the books inside this building not if she made it her life's work there was simply too much too many thousands and there was the long tail the line winding around the counters and displays and shelves winding down all the way forty-six minutes later to the table where DC Glaser sat waiting with a stack of books at his side copies of Eros and Woodsmen piled high and he bent like a scribe over the open books of his reader's scrawling his name with infinite patience he never seemed to tire of it of making his mark on those first blank pages. She began to feel nervous she clutched her own copy to her chest tongue fluttering out to massage her lips fingernails biting into the soft paper dust jacket tearing little crescent moons through. She got to the table and she could not speak her tongue was dry in her mouth her underarms damp with nervous sweat she saw him that creature it does not seem human seems beyond human she thought of the Dune series she read in high school of the god emperor the great worm thing that sees the past and the future that knows everything controls everything was once a child and now this she felt her eyes growing wider and wider she held out the book wordlessly towards him. He studied her looking up from under flat eyelids he took the book held it before him studied the worn cover the faces of the actors there on the cover cross-promoting the film. Did you watch that movie? he asked her his voice hard and cold. The same copy she bought down the street from the movie theater years ago she felt ashamed of it of giving it to him she wanted to say no I love you love your book not that other thing but she couldn't speak her voice was trapped in her throat she had never been paralyzed before not even after she kissed the girl she loved for the first time no this was a more powerful intoxication than any love any sex this was fame this was something beyond she just shook her head. What's your name he asked with his pen poised there was a smudge of chocolate on the title page her eyes widened with horror oh what must he think of her! She tells him Vanessa. He bent to write her name then his own he said did you know that the name Vanessa was invented by Jonathan Swift the Irish writer Jonathan Swift he invented it to call his lover a pet name for her used it in a poem Cadenus and Vanessa have you ever read it? She stammered n-no just Gulliver's Travels though in truth she'd not read the thing only knew it so well she falsely remembered having done so. He said ah and signed his name he shut the book he returned it to her he did not look at her again she left feeling dizzy and frightened and sick and most of all blessed. She treasured the book for years set it up in her room like a shrine and opened it some days ran her finger across the dry ink feeling the shape of it only just perceptible only just there she no longer read it only looked at it looked at the pages as though studying the shapes of the words no longer taking in the meaning slowly it became reduced to a series of symbols a kind of image. Naomi got rid of it that old thing why are you wasting your time? and Vanessa let her dispose of it was all mixed up inside broken to see it gone and feeling at the same time strangely free.

  She goes to the dead professor's office and looks through the old pages the old papers nothing nothing nothing she finds nothing and still she looks a scribble here a note here a fragment they seem promising at first seem like they might be a part of some larger puzzle and she sets them excitedly aside and the piles grow and as they grow it becomes more and more obvious that there was no connection that while they may have been puzzle pieces they are pieces of many incomplete puzzles rather than one whole waiting to be unified there is nothing to be found nothing waiting to be uncovered no secret manuscript there is simply nothing he left nothing behind nothing that any other teacher wouldn't have only graded papers course documents reading lists photocopied pages from a thousand sources attendance rolls names checked off all those names waiting now for an impossible return.

  She is nearly finished not much left now it's all been turned inside out and packed away in cardboard boxes ready to be dragged off bit by bit piece by piece until this place ceases to be his office and becomes just an office anonymous he is removed from it and the space gives up its identity slate wiped clean for a new inscription. She sits back on her haunches her spine sore and her feet aching and her neck stiff she twists the blinds and sees outside that the sun is fading scarlet into violet-gray clouds the sunset. Time is a slippery thing she's never been capable of keeping a firm hold upon the present she is a lingerer always thinking that it is not so late as it is and always caught out in the night. She dwells eternally in the past.

  Vanessa hears a voice in the door she turns and she sees a young woman there with a bag slung over one arm sunglasses cocked on her forehead rings dripping on every finger lips purple almost black holes in the shirt holes in the jeans loose purple scarf purposely ratty a ring through the lower lip. She says

  -Do I know you?

  -Probably not.

  -What are you doing in the professor's office?

  -Looking / I'm his assistant / I was his assistant.

  -I saw the light was on I thought / I don't know what I thought.

  -Did you know Professor Glaser?

  -Yeah I knew him.

  -You were in some of his classes.

  -Yeah sure look what is it that you're doing here?

  -Just trying to help put everything in order.

  -You're looking for that book right?

  -What book is that?

  -The book he was working on / he talked about it in class sometimes / I mean / never directly but you'd pick up on stuff / you could always tell when it wasn't going well because he'd come to class tired and everybody's grades got worse he graded more harshly I mean.

  -Is that right?

  -I'm not lying.

  -I'm sorry I didn't meant to imply

  -Forget it.

  -Can you tell me anything / did he give you any impression of how far along the project was?

  -No not really / have you found anything yet?

  -Nothing that I'm looking for / no new books anyway were you a fan of his?

  -Not a fan I hate that word fan fanatic no I've never been fanatical about anything except food and sex that's a joke / I liked his stuff alright thought some of the early stuff was good he had style one of those classic type writers you know Delillo Updyke McEwan yadda yadda that was never my scene but he was alright / he was a great teacher I learned more in the first week of his course than all the way through approaches to literature I love that phrase approaches to literature like it was some kinda animal and you were sneaking up on it through the shrubbery or something fuck I need a drink I'm sorry am I rambling I've been told that I have a tendency to do that.

  -What's your name?

  -What does it matter you're not going to remember me / we're never going to see each other again.

  -That's one future.

  -There is only one future.

  -How do you mean?

  -What will happen will happen because that's how it has to happen that's the rule
of storytelling the story can only end one way because it has already been written.

  -We don't have any choices?

  -We've already made them.

  -Who wrote this then / do you believe in god?

  -Fuck no.

  -Than who?

  -We do / we write it together the thing about the professor about all those other guys those stuffy authors they can only see the world through the lens of their own selves they only write about one thing about one person it's always about them storytelling on the other hand is a communal art it goes on passed down generation by generation changing from mother to daughter to her daughter to hers. The written word changed it all for the worse if you ask me go back to the oral tradition get rid of all this other nonsense all these books here.

  The girl comes into the room she is touching the soft spines of the hard-cover books which are arranged on the shelves all around the Professor's room. Vanessa watches her closely clutching the papers in her hands afraid knowing that it is absurd but afraid anyway that the girl is going to grab them from her tear them reduce them to nothing but of course she does not just takes a book down off the shelf and flips idly through it eyes scanning over the words within taking them in Vanessa gets the impression that this girl does not know how to read but of course she must know don't be ridiculous. She wonders what it must have been like sitting there in that classroom while DC Glaser thundered about the room his voice booming out his chalk-dusty fingers fluttering animatedly in support of his arguments and the class sitting glassy-eyed chins resting in their smooth palms lips drooping all their thoughts sagging under the weight of deadlines and assignments and hour after hour of lectures she imagines what it must have been like to be there.

  -Did you like Professor Glaser / as a teacher I mean?

  -What do you mean did I like him you mean did I think he was good at his job?

  -Sure.

  -He was fine I already told you that / what is it that you really want to ask me?

  -I don't know what you mean.

  -It's funny isn't it when people die I mean / all of a sudden everybody wants to know everybody gets so damn curious / it's sort of my field you know I'm writing my dissertation on the spiritualists of the late nineteenth century early twentieth people who claimed to speak with the dead who could bring them back for you / most of them were frauds of course very clever actors students of human nature / who knows though? / I've read a lot about them about a lot of different spiritualists and I really do believe that some of them were genuine.

  -Really?

  -Yeah / my mother was a psychic you know anyway she claimed to be said that she heard voices the voices of the dead do you believe in ghosts Vanessa?

  -I honestly don't know.

  -An open mind will take you a long way in this world.

  -What was it like?

  -What?

  -Having a psychic for a mother that must have been interesting.

  -Not nearly so exciting as most people think / she used to make predictions about me for fun you know when I was a girl she said that she would read my palm my tea leaves my auguries whatever of course it all comes down to reading to trying see what is written / it really started to piss me off / not because I thought she was a fake / I didn't at first then I did and now I'm not so sure / it annoyed me because I felt like it was cheating felt like it was taking all the fun out of life to know what was going to happen / like flipping to the end of a book to see the ending before its time.

  -Did any of her predictions come true?

  -I don't know I told her to stop making them and she did / sometimes she'd look at me and sigh and shake her head or something like that that always bugged me of course but for the most part she gave it up got a job at an insurance firm selling shit over the phone to geriatrics she stopped making predictions got this empty look in her eyes started drinking / it's quite the sob story.

  -And?

  -And what? / that's it / her life is like that now there's no special effects ending that's just how it goes / okay here's something you might be interested in something that might make this story work for you it happened after I got my first period I had this cat you see?

  -What about it?

  -I started having dreams I had dreams and I would wake up filled with dread and the image in my head of my cat on the road dead on the road I started having the dreams more and more then had them when I was awake saw it in my mind's every time I looked at that damn cat.

  -Did it happen / was she killed in the street?

  -A lot of cats were killed on that road the neighbor's cat had died there only a few weeks before I had the first dream and my cat was getting on wasn't moving so fast anymore there's no reason my subconscious couldn't have conjured it up all on its own just a regular premonition the workings of the mind beyond our understanding of it no reason to bring my mother's black magic into it.

  -But it was real / you've had others?

  -I've had many others they've gotten stronger over the years / after a while it just gets boring just like sight and touch and smell get boring / it's just another sense.

  -What do you sense about me?

  -That I'm not going to see you again.

  -Sounds ominous.

  -Don't worry / you'll be fine.

  -Will I find the book / DC's last book?

  -Yes and no / that's the kind of bullshit answer my mother was so fond of she was good at that at answering and not answering the sudden ambivalence oh yes of course I know everything but I can't tell you anything specific god that was frustrating.

  -Is any of this true?

  -Of course not / my mother's a dentist / it's just a story I'm working on / Professor Glaser read the first draft you know I think he liked it but I don't know did it hold your interest seem plausible at all?

  -I was interested / I knew it wasn't real though.

  -I'm not much of an actor / it wasn't a lie though.

  -Why not?

  -Storytellers create their own realities / there's truth in fiction.

  -If you say so.

  -So you really haven't found anything?

  -Nope.

  -Good luck I guess / it's strange.

  -What is?

  -It still doesn't feel like he's dead you know / it's like he's just taking a rest out of sight somewhere seems like he's coming back in the fall semester I walk around this empty campus and it feels like everyone all of the teachers have gone but you know they'll be back all of them will come back / when I saw the light in the door there it just felt / it would have been right you know if it was him / if he was back.

  -Trust me / he's dead.

  Vanessa says it plainly enough but she cannot help but feel some leftover doubt. How sure is she? she remembers that darkness that shape she saw in the window remembers hearing the creak of floorboards and the squeak of old hinges in the night long after Joanna was asleep remembers staring out into the darkness of her room and thinking that maybe just maybe there were eyes shining in the gloom two glittering points. She does not think that she really believes in death she will not believe until she is dead herself and gone or still lingering and only then will she really know.

  She and the student have nothing left to say to one another they sit there in the quiet while Vanessa shuffles papers eventually the girl gets up she brushes her hair back off her face plucks a few tufts off her fuzzy peach sweater kicks the heels of her shoes against the floor then finally gets up and leaves. Vanessa is alone again wrapped in cool sorrow on her knees in the dead man's empty room. She takes the last pile of papers out of the last drawer and puts them in her bag. This is it this is the end there is nothing left here for her nothing left of DC Glaser and the room is reduced to shape and memory alone.

  She stands and hefts her bag onto her shoulder and as she is turning to go she reaches down to shut the drawer and she sees something the folded corner of a yellowed page bent and crumpled shoved back behind. She pauses with her hand on the knob wanting t
o push it shut knowing that it is probably nothing of value. There is no point. She shuts the drawer and rises to go out to leave the campus to return to her car to drive back to the house and skim through these last pages. But she does not go. She cannot. She knows that this page will gnaw at her if she does not take it already it is gnawing. She can hardly restrain her annoyance and she gets back down on her knees pushes her hand deep into the recesses scratches it on the rough edge of the cabinet's interior shreds. The paper is soft on her fingertip she cannot quite grasp it she stretches reaches her finger her hand her shoulder her whole arm aching feeling distended and as though about to snap all the bones to break. She catches hold of it by one corner she draws it slowly out teeth gritting and as she does she feels a presence behind her. As sure as she has ever felt anything she feels the person standing above and a sliver of panic runs through her she can feel the heavy shadow can hear the breathing her skin is crawling she jerks back sure the paper will tear and be lost but it slides somehow free coming out in her hand. She whirls around staring up and shouting angrily at her intruder. But there is nobody there. No one hears her cry out. She looks wide-eyed and winded at the empty room. Her heart is pounding in her chest the muscles drawn and sore. She clutches the page to her chest. There was somebody there. She knows there was. Her knees are weak she cannot stand. She smooths the paper against her leg. She looks at it. A letter written by DC dated a few years back a couple months after Undertime came out. The letter begins my dear friends and goes on from there in a frenzied scrawl so thick and scratched that she can scarcely make it out. She reads slowly.

  My dear friends,

  I hate to presume, but I suppose you're probably missing me about now. I hope you are, at any rate. I'm sorry to have gone this way. Damn inconvenient for everybody I'm sure, but that's life after all. Things get messy.

  If you're wondering why... Well. The answer's a touch prosaic, I'm afraid. It's simple: I have a heart condition. I forget what they call it, but never mind the medical jargon. It's enough to say that my heart is failing. HAS failed, by the time you read this. Somebody like me, a writer always looking for a good bit of character or symbolism, would be the first to seize upon that. The old man whose heart failed him. Seems dreadfully saccharine to write it out like that, but never mind. The doctors say that I've got somewhere between five months and two years. It's a strange thing to receive a death sentence, to have it marked down for you like that. It's our first real rite of passage, all of us, finding out that we're someday going to die, that our time on this earth is limited. Still, it's odd to have it narrowed down like this.

  I have decided to take my own life. Though I imagine it's obvious enough to you that I've done so. It's a selfish gesture, certainly. Call it an old man's vanity. Christ, if only I actually was as old as I felt, this might not be so dreadful. You always think that you'll have plenty of time. Then all of a sudden you don't anymore. All of a sudden you're staring it in the face. But I can't just wait to die, to slump down in the street or fall to my knees stepping out of the shower some morning. I can't live my life waiting for the moment of my death. I have to take some measure of control.

  I hope that you'll all forgive me. I've not done this to hurt you, quite the opposite. I wish you all long and happy lives.

  I only wish that I'd had time to write one more book. The truth is, and I can only admit this now knowing that I won't be alive any longer to face it, I've not written anything that I'm truly proud of in some time. Not since Mountain, and even that's no good since the movie people got their claws in it. I can feel it inside me, one last book, one great work. A final masterpiece, something for which they'll remember me. I've not been able to get it out. I've hardly written a word since Undertime.

  I remember what it was like when I was young, full of ideas, a seemingly infinite number of ideas. I actually went back to my old notes, hoping to be inspired, maybe even to pick up one of those old outlines and actually write it. None of it speaks to me anymore. I'm not that same person anymore, and what make me more afraid than anything is the thought that the person I've become isn't as good as that old one. If only I had a little longer, I might have found my way back.

  There are too many of you and too much to say to you all, so I won't attempt it now and fail to do you proper justice. You all know me, most of you better than I know myself. You know better than I what I would say to you, so just assume it said. You've all been a blessing to me. My life was better for your presence in it. Take care of yourselves.

  I hope God doesn't judge me too harshly for this, and for all that I have done. I am going to die, not necessarily content and certainly not satisfied, but at peace all the same.

  Your friend,

  DC Glaser

  All the way back from the college Vanessa thinks about the letter turns it over in her mind considering its content considering its meaning. He knew that he was going to die that was clear and just as clear that he'd planned to end it but withdrawn from the brink what was it that made him change his mind? could it have been the book the as yet undiscovered book this Cannibal's Prayer which they are looking for so desperately in all the wrong places could he have been staying alive just to write it? One last treatise one last word one last marker carved into the soft stone. What kind of man writes a suicide note and shoves it in a drawer to be forgotten by the look of it lets it go tattered and abandoned into the recess what kind of man does that?

  The tires squeal and rattle the car engine hacks and groans with sooty exhaustion she turns onto the highway and drives towards the low blue hills which run across the horizon.

  She decides not to show the letter to Joanna it looks as though DC decided not to leave it and in fact not to kill himself for his death had certainly not been a suicide but caused rather by his heart condition. Never mind. There is nothing in the note for Joanna anyway that rankles Vanessa all that she has read these last few days has shaken her upset her belief in the unshakable artist the writer the author DC Glaser a genius a scholar a poet a truly human soul but that is just it he's just another human another of these petty hating creatures these selfish thoughtless arrogant animals. She is having trouble reconciling the art with the man those books those early books which seemed so strident once so masterful so all-encompassing they have begun to lose their luster have slipped in her estimation that is the remarkable thing about books she thinks when she is back at last in her room at the Glaser house they are so singular purely the product of a single mind and you have to take the good with the bad don't you there are no perfect people we've all our flaws.

  Her phone rings. She picks up.

  -Bradley?

  -Vanessa sweetie please tell me something good / I got these fuckers breathing down my neck companies breaking down the door word got out I guess I don't fucking know how but word got out that we're looking for a last DC Glaser book suddenly everybody wants a piece too bad people couldn't be bothered when he was still alive or else the poor bastard might at least have died rich / course that's how it goes everybody waits till you're dead to pay any attention not too sustainable a business practice unfortunately / anyway my point is that there's money to be made here I'm talking real money hand over fist money you gotta cart out in a wheelbarrow so please please please tell you that you've found something I can use.

  -What do you want me to say Bradley?

  -Shit shit that means you haven't / right?

  -Not yet.

  -Shit.

  -I'm still hopeful though / there might be something here.

  -It's been four days!

  -We still haven't looked in his office Bradley.

  -Why the fuck not? / jesus christ almighty what are you waiting for that's where it would be / shit shit shit what is going on? / do I need to come down there do I need to do every fucking thing myself?

  -Calm down Bradley you're hysterical.

  -Shit.

  -It's delicate Bradley okay / he died in that room / Joanna isn't exactly eager to go
poking around.

  -Fuck / sorry / you will look though?

  -I'll do it tomorrow.

  -How's the old bird holding up?

  -Hm?

  -Joanna / how's she doing?

  -You know / probably gonna be okay.

  -Christ Vanessa / is it that bad?

  -We've found some things Brad.

  -Fuck I don't like the sound of that / things of his?

  -Yeah.

  -For god's sake don't tell me I don't even want to know.

  -It's a mess down here / I feel like I never knew him.

  -I forgot you were a fan weren't you / before I hired you I mean you were a fan of his?

  -I guess I was yes.

  -I've had some chances Vanessa / writers I've loved always loved come to me say they're looking at finding new representation / this bitter shit like a divorce sometimes they say they want to come to me.

  -Yeah?

  -It kills me you know me I'm a fucking businessman but I've got a policy I turn them down every single one of them I just can't do it / I don't want to know these people not the ones who really matter to me whose writing really does something.

  -I never knew you cared.

  -About books? / sure I care why else would I be doing this not like there's big money in it most of the time I do it because I fucking love it and it's because I love it that I have to turn those people away.

  -Bradley / do you think sometimes that we / never mind.

  -What?

  -I said never mind.

  -Okay fine whatever / oh hey look you've been getting some odd messages here at the office I figured it was a wrong number but what the hell I thought might as well ask Vanessa.

  -Oh?

  She rises she wanders out into the kitchen with the phone tucked against her arm half listening looking for Joanna did she go outside? and Bradley is going on about the peculiar messages. She picks up a piece of paper it's got Joanna's handwriting all over it. The page is sitting on the table next to the last stack they took from DC's office it looks like it have been snatched randomly off the pile and written on there are notes cramped in the margins character details plot fragments half written sentences thematic arcs outlined all the bones a whole skeleton coming to life watch as she puts together the skin and the muscles and the organs just watch. Bradley is going on about the messages strange voice-mails a crying woman an angry woman dozens every couple of hours for four days and then nothing the secretary tried to talk to her sometimes but anytime she or Bradley said anything the woman hung up it was like she was looking for somebody and would speak with no one else then all of the sudden just when their nerves were wearing thinnest and the slightest jangle of the phone put their teeth to grinding the calls stopped two days later a call from a hospital in New Jersey somebody looking for an emergency contact the name was never put in just the number and Bradley says that they've probably got the wrong number and the person at the hospital says never mind the patient died anyway suicide slit her wrists they're looking for somebody to come and claim her is all. Vanessa makes a sympathetic sound scarcely paying attention she turns the page over and reads the other side By DC Glaser it says and at this her breath catches in her throat it says The Cannibal's Prayer - Index. There are chapters listed sections check-marks beside some of them beside most could those be finished chapters? She is about to interrupt Bradley and tell him when he says how he asked out of simple curiosity the name of the dead woman and the doctor from New Jersey said that her name was Naomi a young woman named Naomi for whom they could find nobody a woman named Naomi who had killed herself and seemed now in death to be utterly and completely alone.

  Scentless

  Joanna stands up on the tips of her feet stretches reaches god she hadn't realized how high it had always been David who but never mind she can reach it on her own or not no not this she cannot quite she brings a stool from the kitchen and pulls on the cord so that with an empty sigh the stairs unfold down opening that black pathway into the dust-choked confines of the cramped attic. This abandoned corner of the house exhales dust like a smoggy last breath she pinches her nose and waves a hand at the gray tumble of soft falling particulates like an ash storm the morning after the fire has died and embers gone cold as gray snowfall. She puts one foot on the first step she debates silently whether or not she should bother to make the attempt. Now that she stands in the mouth of action the thing no longer seems so necessary she wonders if she is only being superstitious or nostalgic if perhaps she should go back and write by hand after all she doesn't really need the machine now does she? She takes a deep breath filtered against the arm of her sweater and goes up as though into avionic murk.

  It was her father's typewriter he used it only rarely to her knowledge at least but then she doesn't really know he may have used it for all manner of things beyond the range of her awareness things hidden from her private things. Who could say what experiences it had before he gave it to her no that's not right not given but left left for her to find in that empty house she'd gone there after the accident stood in that empty place taking stock of her parent's lives she had wandered the rooms and found it there her father's typewriter sitting silent with stately old-world elegance keen to its purpose and glistening to be touched. She had forgotten that it was there. It was a beautiful device all glossy black and chrome metal keys of ivory the letters most frequently used worn utterly away and the rest faded to dim outlines mere scratches the suggestion of letters only it was a beautiful device it fit the hands fit the fingertips laid to cool keys which when pressed offered a satisfying clack and imprinted their clean black letters on the cream-white pages an indelible mark like a scar an eternal change like the whittling away of a mountain she remembers sitting on her father's lap tapping out her earliest fantasies the girl and the fairy queen fluttering high over the palace of rose bushes and she staring so intently poking with one extended finger first at this letter than the next watching it all come together on the page like some arcane magic like deciphering a code something which none might know but she. Writing is like creating a new language each story she make is a new language speaks new words new codes and combinations it is all so alchemical so elemental she'd loved it right from the start loved building the letters into words the words into sentences the sentences into paragraphs the paragraphs into chapters the chapters into books the books into whole worlds it was magic it was love. She has many memories of that typewriter and now wants to feel the ivory keys at her fingertips again. Ivory keys. That is it ivory like a piano some grand Steinway some vast concert hall beast and from it emerging the music the song ever the song that's what writing is it is like singing a song to yourself. She had used her father's typewriter all through her last years of school after the accident when she was all alone she used it and then she had David and she put it aside put it up here in this dust clogged attic-space. Now she is once more alone and she needs it again.

  She climbs.

  The darkness is about her deep as blindness she reaches clasping emptiness she crawls up into the dust thick as sheep's wool up to her wrists soft and giving off a stale collected odor she brushes through it sightless not breathing feeling for the dangling cord of the lamp which she knows hangs somewhere above her a red extension cord snaking off towards the lonely steel-plated outlet in the corner she clutches nothing. The floor unfinished floor creaks beneath her weight moaning its threat to break. She feels for the cord the snapping dangling cord swaying somewhere above she is sure she reaches and overbalances she falls to her knees tumbles into the giving mouth of a rotten cardboard box which at once collapses beneath her giving way opening itself. She shakes her head blowing dust out her nose licking her dry and dirty lips her arms are caught in the box she feels something hard and metallic in there strangely warm in the cool attic shade a metal retaining old heat her fingers close around something weighty and inert and she draws it out into the frail light to which her eyes are now at last beginning to adjust. She draws it out a
nd holds it up it gleams in her hand familiar and repulsive a tall foot-tall figure distinctly male holding his body stiff and upright shoulders wide and hips narrow his face the blank face of a clay doll it is David's Oscar. It wasn't kept with the awards in the bookcase downstairs she knows why of course but she never thought he would have banished it this far hidden here in this dusty crypt she never realized just how ashamed he was of the whole thing.

  It had been like something out of a dream. The day the man from the studio appeared at the door. The house had been younger then and heading towards ruin they simply didn't have the time or money to keep up the place properly could only let it go instead inch by inch back to the earth she thought that soon there would be trees taking root inside and growing their hungry leaves up and out the windows and door vines tearing away shingles root systems gnawing at the foundations the earth itself rejecting their presence. The royalties from DC's first few novels amounted to hardly a drop and David was working the checkout counter at a supermarket in town as it was the only work he could find which was palatable to him for her part she was doing whatever she could to raise money working three part-time jobs every penny seemed a struggle and then it was all spent with hardly a protest from either of them money spilling through their hands it seemed they were always spending it on taxes on their mortgage on their old student loans on their car on food it just slipped away. And then the man came the man with his pressed black suit not a single crease or wrinkle his face half hid behind wide black sunglasses and twitching beneath the small sympathetic smile. He reached into his pocket before saying a word and he took out his card pressed it into David's hand and he said I represent those were the first words he spoke that he was not there for himself that he was not there as himself he stood waiting to be invited in said that he loved David's work DC's work he was a huge fan he said and David invited him in David never could resist a fan. They sat down at the kitchen table she offered him iced tea he turned her down she offered him a soda he turned her down she offered him a scotch he turned her down she offered a water he took it she thought just to shut her up and wrapped his fingers around the glass he took a single sip he said that he'd read the book the new book The Mountain and God he said that the people he represented were interested in making it into a movie they wanted the film rights he said and tilted the cup so that the water lapped almost over the edge behind his sunglasses she could see his eyebrow crooked. The money god the money he offered so much money more than they'd ever heard of more than they'd ever imagined they might possess standard agreement he said his mouth bleeding money. After the man left they talked she said it was strange wasn't it that he had come here like this just turned up that was strange it was wasn't it what if it was some kind of scam? David just nodded he seemed to shrink in his chair his head down his shoulders drawn and hunched his hands working in his lap threading together and coming apart again and again nervous he looked at the man's card on the table he picked up the card he held it gingerly just by the sharp corners like it was a biting animal or poison he turned it considering the light moving across it. The book had only been out for a few weeks it had been doing well it had been well received had gotten a couple of good reviews one magazine had called it the crowning achievement of DC Glaser's career and of course David had gone on about that been incensed crowning achievement he repeated voice rising and more incredulous with every exclamation how can they say that didn't they read the book? don't they realize what it's really about? he said he shouted the question at her never waited for an answer my next one will knock their fucking socks off he said had said often said it to her to his agent to people he meet at book signings she'd heard said it to everybody who would listen and they were all confused by his manner all wondered what was wrong with him shouldn't he be happy about this? but Joanna of course Joanna knew him better knew that to be appreciated to be recognized was more than DC could stand he didn't want to be recognized by the critics his was a campaign of total war he would accept nothing less than utter victory for them to write about his work was to reduce it to the level of all the other books no matter the grade or number of representative stars or superlatives employed he was always annoyed read them out loud sometimes inserting himself in the frequent form of all-too-audible snorts and grunts of derision little sneers whenever she confronted him he claimed that he didn't care what they thought of him but she knew that of course it was all he cared about he craved their approval more than that he craved their worship it was not enough to be recognized he needed more than that he swore his next book would be an attack it would be their punishment for not appreciating him enough Joanna thought sometimes very privately that it was spite as art. But of course he'd had no ideas for this great novel it was nothing now but theory and thought and idea and here he was now sitting poor at his table and the sharp corners of the Hollywood agent's card and the promise of money so much money. More than money it was respect it was recognition. And yet. They had tried to option Life in the North a few times before and he'd always turned them down turned them down sneering and hateful he would look to her and ask if they like it so much if they really love it like they say they do than why the hell would they want to make a movie of it isn't the book enough? if you can love the thing if it's got real power then why would they want to change it they're saying that it wasn't enough wasn't good enough is what they were saying. The book was not the end point they were saying it was just an audition they were saying. It was a fucking insult that was what he had said then but they hadn't been offering so much money then not nearly so much money. They looked at each other knowing that they did not need to speak the words we need that money look how easily all our grand ambition all our pride look how it melts away in the face of need peel back the plastic skin and look at what pulses beneath we are all animals here we just want to eat and sleep and fuck and roll over in the sun with our bellies up waiting to be cut open waiting to be crushed we all are at heart slaves of need.

  David took the money.

  They made the movie.

  And that was that.

  He never wrote another word which was not wrenched out which was not forced from him marched at snarled knife-point from the tips of his fingers she stopped reading his books he stopped reading them too. The machine which was DC Glaser rolled on well enough its inertia moving it forward the critics who'd liked his early books continued to like them though the reviews now were couched in self-reflexive language defensive and trite his language refined they said and those who'd not liked his early books continued to not like them though the reviews were now laden with smug surety the books sold just as well better now much better after the movie that stung that hurt him worse than all the rest he stopped speaking to his fans when he could help it didn't answer their letters didn't invite them to lunch didn't look them in the eye he did not trust them after the movie.

  Joanna never saw the film herself she'd never wanted to. David took her to visit the set when they were filming they two had felt like the outsiders they were standing there with David's characters stalking about surrounded by agents and assistants and publicists it was all being made real and somehow lifeless when they came home David burned a copy of the book it means nothing anymore he said sounding not angry but defeated and they watched together while flame consumed the pages. He wept in his sleep that night she watched him in the dark watched the glassy tears roll down his great face into his thick black beard she stroked his damp cheek and thought what dreams must be in his mind.

  Just before she came up here she had spoken to David's mother on the phone. And all the while hearing the sound of Vanessa weeping in her room.

  -Joanna dear.

  -Mama this is a surprise.

  -Is it?

  -It certainly is / is papa alright?

  -You didn't think I would find out did you?

  -Mama?

  -Thought you'd pick his bones clean and I'd be none the wiser isn't that right?

  -I'm sorry I

>   -Don't say you don't know don't play ignorant with me Joanna I know what's going on down there.

  -I'm afraid I really don't

  -Isn't it enough that he's dead / and you you might as well have killed him yourself.

  -What the hell are you talking about / is it papa?

  -Stop calling him that Joanna! / that man is not your father and I am not your mother / you are not my daughter you weren't when you had David and you certainly aren't now / I know what you're doing / you're a parasite Joanna you always have been sucking the blood sucking the life out of my poor boy you think I didn't see what you were up to you think I didn't know? / but this is too much this is a new low I never thought you would sink to this not even you.

  -I don't know what you think you know

  -Don't snip at me Joanna / I won't have you tarnishing his memory.

  -Excuse me but where do you

  -I know you're looking through his things Joanna trying to auction off his legacy / you're a vulture girl and I won't let you do it.

  -I'm sorry mama but fuck you / anything he left behind is legally mine.

  -It is for now / I won't just sit back and watch you / my son

  -I'll do what I want / if you have something you want to say to your son then you go right ahead and follow him wherever it is he went off to / good bye.

  And she'd hung up. She had been stunned by the whole conversation it had felt unreal more like a dream. She'd always hated that woman. David's mother. She never really knew his father he'd avoided them David had implied once that he'd been broken-hearted to see his son marry outside the faith and Joanna remembered cocking her head and frowning and saying it back at him the faith? a question and he just smiled and hugged her tight and changed the subject. David's mother had apparently felt the same way the significant difference being that she didn't let her broken heart stop her from injecting herself into her son's life however possible. Joanna had wanted to love them had been desperate to have parents again but nothing she ever did could break that shell they were cocooned in a religion which they seemed hardly to understand. Eventually she had given up on them.

  Joanna sits back in the dust. The award gleams in the faint light which comes up through the attic hatch she turns it in her hands.

  David had been excited at first about the movie they asked him to write the script and he did just as they asked. They threw it all out of course kept hardly a line started from scratch never even told him he didn't find out until opening night. They kept his name up there white on black light cut through the so-called silver screen they stripped him out of his story and then they put his name up in lights and they gave him an award for it. She remembers the night of the ceremony he'd refused to go at first but of course eventually he was persuaded he'd sat there brooding between two movie stars two young and beautiful actors with easy smiles and effortless charm and he'd seethed his features black as a storm-cloud and when they said his name his name among others Best Adapted Screenplay they said and he rose like a titan rose and thundered through the crush of applause up the steps across the stage he took the statue in his grip and stood behind the two others who had actually written the thing had erased everything he'd done he let them speak briefly so briefly nobody wanted to hear the writers speak they were to be ushered swiftly away in favor of more familiar faces when it was his turn he cleared his throat against the microphone and she saw it in his eyes she saw his fear once he was actually up there and looking out at the room full of people more famous and more loved than he his whole being filled with fear. He cleared his throat again and this time it was a retreat a meek stall all his bluster gone all his promises of shaming evaporated he simpered he deferred he thanked his agent and his beautiful wife and the director for capturing his vision so poignantly and then he'd lumbered back to his seat like a red-faced child clutching his new toy and shaking with terror.

  And now she holds the award she grasps it that faceless man she thinks she sees in the rising dust off the attic floor the vague shape of a heavy face forming in the gray powder it is David's face she thinks staring sadly back at her gazing with desperation with loss she leans closer a cold shiver running down her spine she is hallucinating she thinks this is a waking dream nothing but a shadow in the dark she reaches out for it and the mouth of the thing opens and inside that wispy shape there are shinning teeth gnashing and hateful she jerks her hand back and the Oscar falls she looks away and when she looks back there is nothing.

  She goes trembling to the old cardboard box in which her typewriter is stored and she wrestles it out and down the steep steps. She carries it cradled in her arms down the hall past Vanessa's room she has not come out all day Joanna can't figure out what happened it was something to do with a phone call some sort of emergency Joanna didn't pry she is unsure around the other woman now does not feel like herself. Their night together had woken something in her but it is not love not even lust it had been a wakefulness she'd woken up that morning desperate for the first time in a decade to write David is gone and she is alive and she can write like she did before he was in her life before he was famous before people knew her as the writer's wife now she is herself again just Joanna. She can't even begin to say yet if the novel is worthwhile or if it is doomed from the start as so many projects of hers have been or if there might be some spark some flash of light but she wouldn't stop now she is in the grip of it all tangled up with the need to create. It is a need that cannot be satisfied only fed so feed it she does with page after page of handwritten notes it's only been a day or two now but it feels like weeks feels like years feels like all the repressed desires are pushing out all together now and it is time at last to put words down in ink to start the writing of the thing itself. She wishes that she could talk to Vanessa about it but the other woman seems not uninterested but at any rate uninspired. They talked a little discussed theories of authorial style and plot points and character sketches and the relative merits of first or third or even second person and Joanna could hear the echo of university classes in Vanessa's voice a kind of automatic reflexive quality to the answering as if the whole thing were a science and there was one right answer.

  Joanna doesn't give a fuck about doing it right all that matters is doing it her way for herself. All the rest is just so much bullshit. She'd seen it happen to David all the other stuff creeps up on you and it stops being about the work about the process about the discovery you stop wandering the frontier and put down stakes and the foul city begins to grow around you spreading from your planted feet like an oil spill until it swallows you up.

  The film followed David to the college. He always blamed others for the fact that it had infiltrated his life blamed his students for bringing it up if you took enough classes from DC Glaser eventually you learned not to talk about it blamed the other teachers one year the movie was even part of the curriculum in a freshman level film studies class when David heard that he went cold with rage complained to the administration tracked down the teacher a young guy hardly out of film school himself and berated him on the campus green nobody could quite figure out what for least of all the poor teacher. Joanna privately suspected that David hadn't been so much angry that the film was being used in a class as he was that his books were not. She could tell that he wanted to use them in his own classes but for a long time he resisted told her that it would be tactless would look desperate or cheap to use his own books and she agreed with him but she could see it in his eyes how much he wanted to he was almost sick with the need to be recognized. Eventually he did teach from his own novels but by then he was no longer talking to her about that sort of thing so she didn't bother to offer an opinion she wondered if he'd simply stopped caring. Of course it had been his fault that the movie had come to school with him he'd carried it in with him like a virus like tainted blood in his veins.

  She sets down the typewriter on the little table in the little room and sits there in her little chair with the door shut against the rest of the house and ag
ainst all of David's ghosts in it. She puts her fingers to the ivory keys and waits for something to happen. Starting is the hard part it's like trying to work up the courage to leap into a very cold very fast moving river once you're in you go numb and are rushed downstream without hardly a thought but that first leap is of such paralyzing difficulty she sits poised on the edge of her chair waiting for the words. Everything which seemed clear to her crystallized in her mind only a moment ago now feels muddled all lost in vague half-thought. And as she waits for the words her mind drifts her eyes drift across the plain surfaces of those four walls around her this is it this is a room of her own she wonders if Virginia Woolf was ever insecure like this. There in the corner a few silk threads the beginnings of a spider's web with no spider in evidence to tend it a water stain in another high corner a pile of old newspapers stacked against the wall old things left here to rot away. When they first moved here David had been so proud to give her this room had presented it like a new parent to their child this is for you your place. She thinks again of Mrs. Woolf never mind the space what if a woman needs more than that more than just space what if she doesn't have anything with which to fill the room no talent bursting to the walls no gift singing out in the quiet what does she do then? Joanna rests her head in her hands there is a little window above the desk looking out into the yard there are the trees waving icily in a chill wind the first buds of spring dying frostbitten on the points of its limbs she pushes her fingers into her hair rests her head down she knows that she looks like David did as he often did when wrestling with his art the unconscious mimicry makes her skin crawl and she lays her head flat on the desk her ear to the heartbeat of the pine wood. She wants to write but all the words in her mind are David's words she can hear his voice echoing in her head back in the early days in those first days they used to lay together naked on the bed touching each other's bodies for hours at a time and they used to speak used to write together with words like fire saying spells and scrawling fingertips across pages of flesh they wrote in a language all their own. David took it all and turned it into books wrote the novels like translation. It had always seemed to her good and just for the mercurial wanderings of their language to be turned solid in his hands had felt right to her look at the thing now you can hold it in your arms turn it in your mind now it is real. She isn't sure anymore that it is right.

  Outside her window Joanna sees Vanessa standing swaying almost on her feet in the sodden grass like a child come before the council of trees they stand shaggy-faced and long armed over her stretching out their shadows to cloak her soft form she seems lost looking first this way than the other taking tentative steps which carry her nowhere finally she sits sinks down to herself below the damask sunrise sky. For a while Joanna watches only looks she thinks of the way David would stare out these windows studying the animals gazing from behind glass cut off and watching the world she puts her fingers to the typewriter keys and she knows in that moment that she could write could just stare out at the woman weeping in the wet grass and write drawing pain drawing emotion she could turn it to fiction and remain behind the glass as David had. She pushes down one finger and there is a clack she pushes down another then another there's a word now spilled in black on the cream white paper an easy word a word essentially meaningless on its own we are all meaningless on our own. She gets up from behind the desk and she leaves the window leaves the room goes out into the cool spring air and crosses the wet lawn and kneels beside Vanessa the word she'd written was THE and that was all just an article with no subject a slave with no master just THE.

  She wraps her arms around Vanessa and Vanessa wraps her arms around she they hold each other the dew licking their thighs and Vanessa weeps and Joanna weeps with her. The smell of morning rises around them fresh and clean and new newer than anything sweet in their lungs and full of life there was no smell in the little room only a stale sterile fume now she is outside Joanna breaths deep the smell of the morning. Eventually they rise and they walk to the lake out onto the end of the little wood dock and they roll up the hems of their pants and trail their bared feet in the cool water while above them the sun burns higher in the sky and the trees sway to the dance of silent music.

  -She's dead Joanna I can't believe that she's dead.

  -Who was she? / was she yours?

  -My only.

  -I'm sorry.

  -I just can't / how can she be dead? / she was so young / we were both so young.

  -Everybody is young once.

  -And then they die.

  -You remember that line?

  -Of course I remember / I was his assistant it was my job to remember / I feel like I remember everything he ever wrote / remember more than anything else more than my own childhood more than my own dreams.

  -You must miss her terribly.

  -I do / now I know I'll never see her again / it's strange I hated her so much I was so angry at her the things she did the things she said to me / I never thought I could ever forgive her / now I just / miss her.

  -It's hard.

  -That's how you feel isn't it? / about DC?

  -It feels wrong now to miss him / I spent so much time waiting for him to leave to be gone / I was happy so happy to see him go / and then / he died and

  -How am I supposed to deal with this?

  -How did she die?

  -Does it matter?

  -To you it might.

  -She killed herself.

  -I'm sorry.

  -She always hated / I don't know what / but she was full of hate / and sadness / sometimes I wonder if she was ever happy.

  -Life isn't easy Vanessa.

  -I know that.

  Joanna touches the young woman's dark hand. She feels a queer stirring inside herself. They go together into the house and into the guest bedroom Vanessa's things are strewn about Vanessa blushes and starts to pick them up Joanna helps her to fold her clothes the fabric is soft as skin on her hands. They lay on the bed with their eyes shut.

  Vanessa asks Joanna to tell her about what she is writing.

  Joanna tells her.

  The curtains are drawn. They speak in the darkness of that room.

  They rise hours later and Vanessa leads her out into the pooling moonlight with a notebook and a pencil and she lays belly down on the dock with her feet waving in the air and she writes the words Joanna speaks to her by the blue light of a bright summery night sky. They lay there together for a long time until the words come spilling down off the page the ink slipping from the paper to fall through the cracks of the pier and disappear in the black water below. And they forget everything forget the dead and forget the world and forget the papers waiting in David Glaser's office waiting in pristine silence on the shelves and on the mantel of the fireplace and on the top of the desk where he wrote away the last moments of his life.

  It will all have to wait for tomorrow.

  Undertime

  It is the magic hour the dead rise and walk the earth here in this gray time between the fleeing night and the fast breaking day her mother used to have a story about this time of day Vanessa does not remember it exactly but can draw upon the essence of the fable something about a sad moon woman chased by her amorous sun god lover and every twilight and every dawn was a mark of their failure of their sad dance across the sky their endless chase always searching and never finding the sun bled before nightfall and when dawn came the moon wept that her lover had not yet found her. The story had always disturbed Vanessa she'd never liked that sort of story it opened her eyes too wide to the essential sadness at the heart of the world she wanted happy endings or if they must be sad at least be final she did not like to look up at the sky and see the sun chasing after his mistress the moon and think that she was part of a story still in the process of being told. She wants to be free of them all to pull them clinging from her ankles like trialing cobwebs wrapped around the finger and thrown away.

  She wanders half asleep to the kitchen and sits down in the chair ther
e and while she waits for the coffee to brew she puts her head in her hands and her eyes drift shut and she tries to stay awake to stay aware a little longer. Her head is heavy seems to weigh a thousand pounds every thought a weight and her arms are so weak her hands so weak. Her eyes close. She jerks awake suddenly aware that she has been sleeping how long a few seconds an hour maybe she looks across the table Naomi is sitting there dressed in a sleek black dress that sculpts with luxurious precision the curve of her hips she has on long gloves up to her elbows almost and they look soft as velvet her swept gold hair pinned back with a jade clasp above her ear twirled and pooled in tight blonde loops she has on cotton stockings and heels she kicks off the shoes and lets her stockinged feet slide bare across the tile floor the gloves the long gloves she tugs them away one finger at a time pulled free like shedding a second skin and her body beneath is pale and soft her fingers long and supple and eager she touches them to the piano keys this is not a table this is Naomi's piano they are in an empty concert hall and Naomi is performing why has nobody come to watch? the seats are empty as faces Vanessa rests her head down on the heavy dark bulk of the piano and she stares at her lover. Naomi looks back green eyes flashing as she scampers up and down her scales and the notes ring out hollow they do not fill the concert hall as they should but stay close like the piano is being played in a tiny airless room she begins to play the song spills out just for them theirs alone. Vanessa stands up she asks

  -Are you alright?

  -I love music Vanessa / because music makes sense to me in a way that real life never did.

  -I don't know this piece / what are you playing?

  -They took away my piano you know chopped it up for firewood / no not firewood of course not they don't burn things not up there in the high rises / it probably rotted away in some dump somewhere some vast repository where does it all go I wonder? / it can't all decay not all of it so it must be piling up what do you think will happen will the world be drowned in garbage will it swallow us up? / maybe we could shoot it out into space just dump it all up there in the stars let it drift around us our halo of plastic wrappers and filthy diapers and disposable cameras and broken pianos until it begins to block out the sun and we're all in darkness down here / it will be gradual though we won't notice it we'll get small and hunched and stunted wide eye goblins pawing in a gloom that never blinks how long do you think we'll last?

  -Who took away your piano?

  -My mother and father / they said that I cared about it too much you see what kind of people they were such people if you love it than it cannot be good well / I loved myself / but they taught me what to do with that break it smash it leave it shattered on the sidewalk for the garbage truck to carry away out of sight on towards that great waste-dump in the sky where nobody will ever have to think about it again.

  -Are you in pain where you are?

  -I don't know / where am I? / what does pain mean? / I don't feel anything I never have that's always been my problem.

  -Why did you do it?

  -What have I done this time?

  But the words are stuck in Vanessa's throat. Naomi shrugs and begins to play again her fingers are impossibly deft and light upon the keys she hardly seems to be touching them at all and the notes ring out clear and bright and woven together. Her smile is soft and rictus her eyes impossibly bright.

  -I'm sorry you're dead Naomi.

  -Am I dead?

  -You are.

  -And you / are you still alive?

  -Still.

  -And what is it you're doing?

  -I'm looking.

  -Looking for what?

  -For DC's book.

  -Ah / your boss.

  -He's not my boss he's dead too.

  -Vanessa! / I'm dead / He's dead / is everybody dead?

  -Most people are you know.

  -Very clever / you were always so clever silly little me I couldn't keep up couldn't understand you and your complicated thoughts all your knowledge you made me feel stupid you know I'd sit there beside you just smiling dumbly laughing when everybody else laughed wishing I could understand what you and all your clever friends were talking about wishing that it mattered to me / all I wanted to do was play the piano but you ruined that too they all ruined it I felt like a freak a dumb freak all you clever people watching me contort myself for your pleasure just an amusement an animal in a cage.

  -I'm not being clever / and I never liked to watch you play.

  -No?

  -It hurt too much / I could see it on your face how much it took out of you / like you were dying like it was killing you to bring something that beautiful into the world it was like a birth / and I couldn't stand to see you in pain / not for anything.

  -All music is pain / all art is pain.

  -I don't believe that.

  -That's because you aren't an artist darling / I love you god I love you but you're too clever to be an artist you're too sensible / art is abandonment / art is pain / if you do not starve for it then it is not art it's just a hobby just a distraction just a trick like a dog sitting on its ass and waving its paws for food and attention / art will tear you apart and nobody will ever understand nobody will ever appreciate it they will never see through your eyes / do you recognize this music?

  -I've never heard you play it before / I've never heard anybody play it.

  -Nobody has / I wrote this music / did you know they called me a genius? / a child prodigy all these whiskered men clawing all over me slavering for the gift they all thought they could leech on they were all desperate they all wanted to be artists wanted to create but knew in their hearts that they never would they thought that if they could create me then that might be enough / my parents were so flattered they sent me to the best schools the finest academies in the world and when I would play for the skeptics for the judges for the admissions boards they would all cry they would all say that it was so beautiful they would say that I was so perfect but I knew that it wasn't real just to play a dead man's song was not real it was just a hobby just a distraction / I started to write my own music I wrote it in secret I hoarded it and would play for no one / the whiskery men the hatchet faced women they were all horrified they were all stern why doesn't she play they asked each other talking over my head like I wasn't there like I was just an / it / a performing thing but I was not that thing I wasn't a wind up doll I was a creator / I slaved over my piano I wept and bled and I wrote music it's all writing just another language just the way sound hits the ear turned to paper I wrote and wrote and when I finished I slit my wrists / I was sixteen years old / it was the first time I tried / my parents found me bleeding out on the keys took me to the hospital smashed the piano I didn't care I was done with it there was nothing left.

  -But you weren't done.

  -I kept playing / eventually I went back to it / music scholarship all that but I never wrote again it was too much it was too hard / I hadn't the blood left for it / I think sometimes that I would have been better off if they'd left me to die up there / nothing afterward was worth anything / nothing but you / us / but I still have this song always have it in me / something I made something for me something that will always be mine / I have this and I have its pale shadow.

  -It's beautiful.

  -It's everything / I wanted you to hear it.

  -Thank you.

  -I love you Vanessa / you do know that don't you?

  She stands up off the stool holds out her naked hands palms up but the music is still coming still spilling out though no one is playing the instrument anymore the music is forever now another fragment of life of truth of beauty of art glittering in the world never heard never known only existing and that is enough.

  -Vanessa?

  Her head rises from the table. She looks across the dark gloom of the kitchen. Joanna stands in the doorframe her bathrobe tied loosely around the waist.

  -Are you alright Vanessa?

  -Fine / only dreaming.

  Joanna pours the coffee cr
eam and sugar you remembered! Vanessa drinks greedily her eyes painfully shut drinking away sleep banishing those dreamy tatters of thought still lingering. Joanna drinks as well her elbow on the table and her robe open at the breast unconscious of the fact her eyes cloudy and her mind far far away.

  -You know what his mother thinks?

  -Whose mother?

  -David's.

  -No / what does she think?

  -She thinks that I'm trying to steal from him / grave robbing she said / that I'd pilfer his name abuse his legacy tarnish his reputation now he's not here to protect it from me / as if she ever cared / the bitch hated his books when he was alive / hated them violently / weren't Christian she said were indecent were ungodly she blamed me I think for leading him from the true path / I was just the wicked temptress.

  -Did he believe in God?

  -Always / at least as far as I know / we didn't talk about it much but there were always signs / little things / I really do think he truly believed / he was always afraid of god / afraid of being judged.

  -And she thinks you're going to / what? / pass off his writing as your own? / or your writing as his?

  -Either / both / I don't know.

  -Why don't you?

  -Hm?

  -Who's to stop you?

  -You are I think / isn't that why Bradley sent you?

  -Yes.

  -He actually said that? / the snake!

  -But what does a name mean anyway? / what does authorship mean?

  -Now you're being pedantic.

  -Am I?

  -You're still dreaming Vanessa time to wake up / anyway I wouldn't want to be DC Glaser / nothing in the world I want less to be honest.

  -Somebody has to be.

  -Do they?

  -Should we look in his study today Joanna?

  -I don't know if I can.

  -Are you sure?

  -I'm not ready yet / you must think that's childish of me.

  -Of course I don't.

  -There are spirits in this house Vanessa / you've seen them haven't you?

  -I don't know.

  -I'm not talking about ghosts or some supernatural hocus pocus I'm talking about the spirit of a person / do you think we have them? / some ineffable portion?

  -I don't know / it's a nice idea.

  -I feel David here / maybe it's just in my mind but that's enough isn't it? / in my mind is real enough / a part of him did not die he left it behind a part in me something foul and desperate.

  -What will you do if we find something?

  -I don't know yet / he never told me what he wanted / but I

  -Yes?

  -I don't know what he would have wanted / and I do want to respect his wishes / it was a part of him every word he wrote was like a child to him it meant something / we were never able to have children we tried you know tried tried tried all the bullshit fertility treatments this and that / low sperm count was the problem and there's some irony in that though I never could pinpoint it David was terribly upset but I'm glad now / a child would have been a disaster not me not him not us / just as well he was left with his books I don't know what he would have wanted / I suppose I'll know when I see it / if there is something anything there.

  -Do you want me to look? / in the study I mean.

  -Yes I think you'd better / Bradley's getting impatient / bastard.

  And their conversation ends trails off the words coming in drips like a leaky faucet spilling some last few halfhearted gifts and when it runs dry Vanessa does go into the study she goes there when the full light of morning is streaming through the windows and all the world outside is rattling at the glass.

  Seeing DC's things his books and manuscripts his pencils patterned with bite marks his eyeglasses half-folded and set on the edge of the shelf his shoes in the corner a spare pair with the laces looped and draped back into the tongue drooping free the potted plant on the windowsill cactus turning a faint brown you can see the creep of death as the color fades like the advance of rot down a gangrenous limb it is overwhelming she can feel his presence here so strongly. Ghosts Joanna said spirits the living portion a remnant of this dead person that was what Joanna said. There is a cold breath in the room it's a beautiful day outside winter dead into approaching spring and the tufts of long grass are quivering in the wind and the bumblebees are bobbing from flower to flower and all the world is bristling with sex.

  She remembers the first time she went into Bradley's office interviewing for the job sweating and nervous and feeling as though she was an interloper and a liar waiting for everybody to point at her and shout out you do not belong here you are not worthy you are arrogant for even thinking you could ever do this. Bradley was sitting behind his desk shouting into his telephone not caring who overheard him and when he turned to first look at her he eyed her up and down from toes to tip with a calculating look on his face a summing up an exploration and final tepid approval he waved at her to sit down and kept right on shouting into his phone. The interview was tedious both of them circling warily towards the foregone conclusion was she familiar with DC Glaser? which was her favorite book? interesting and a mark on the little notepad by his elbow he asked had she ever done this sort of work before what sort of work she asked and told him that she was actually a writer herself in a fashion she at once regretted saying it and wished she could take it back could swallow the words before they entered his mind he just nodded and made another note on his pad and there was a measure of silence an awkward beat into which neither of them was willing to tread until at last Bradley asked her when just out of curiosity you understand when she could start oh right away she told him and he said

  -Life is full of little annoyances you know this I'm sure as well as anybody there are always things we'd rather not do taking your car for an oil change balancing your checkbook shopping for your nephew's birthday all that shit / well your job is to take care of as many of DC's annoyances as you can so that the man can focus on writing writing writing / he makes money I make money I pay you / you are employed by me but your work for him understand? / good / I won't lie it's not glamorous work largely secretarial largely bullshit you'll probably hate it a lot of the time but there will be perks real perks not some dental plan bullshit / you'll be in direct contact with a man who I believe and I believe you believe is one of the great artists of our time one of the greatest living writers there are people who would kill for this chance probably literally you'll go places with him organize appearances manage his schedule blah blah but you'll also be assisting him in his writing who knows maybe you'll even have some creative input on some level but for god's sake don't tell him I said that and don't volunteer anything unless he asks for it! / the pay's fair the work's relatively straightforward and it'll put you in the position to help in a small way with the creation of real true and lasting art / you can think about it for a few days if you need to.

  She did not need to think about it.

  She steps around DC's heavy wooden desk her fingers trailing on the cool smooth surface of the wood her feet dragging across the coarse carpet and then there she is standing over his chair and sitting and now she is in the place of the great writer sitting in the ghost of the artist her self in his place and she can feel the energy of it thrumming along her bones. She pulls open the heavy drawers pulls them all open and there it is. All of DC Glaser's papers his notes his paperclips his pens his stubby pencils his folded scarps of paper upon which are scribbled in bleary midnight haste a bevy of fragmented ideas scraps gathered from the sleeping mind and ferried over into the light by desperate messenger that flimsy ship across raging seas and the note is all which remains a few ragged letters and these shapes are the building blocks the pieces which make up everything she looks at them not reading just looking and it strikes her then in a strange way that those letters are the dawn of everything they are the difference between animal and humanity the something else the spark language is everything she thinks it is the gateway it is path to self awarenes
s without language there is nothing but sex there is only evolution the slurry of genes spilling out generations diluted and frail. This is the new evolution she thinks as she takes out a piece of the writer's paper and takes up the writer's pen and she writes a word down and then another locking it into place this is the new evolution she thinks we are passing on something else now the written word the writer and the reader it is a holy bond close as lovers. And the offspring is the idea. She feels acutely the divorce of the two selves here is the physical self sitting in this chair his bulk unrestrained and growing. The fat bastard. He used to call himself that when he was in New York he would send her out for food he'd say fetch something for this fat bastard would you? And she would. She worked as his assistant for almost two years before he died. That is the first part of a person it is the flesh the being the physical weight upon the world. But there is somebody else someone trapped in these pages. From time to time a kind of jovial laughter burbling up from his gut he was like a favorite uncle the sort who was always a bit drunk and told outrageous jokes that made your parents guffaw and cover your ears and say his name in voices of mock outrage. He was the kind of person you could love most of the time. Sometimes his moods were black and woe betide you should his eye fall upon you when when his ire was raised. She takes up a fistful of paper and begins to leaf through it. There is a higher soul something beyond the flesh she can feel it at her fingertips can sense it somewhere in those words.

  Then comes entropy.

  Bradley hired her just after DC had finished writing Undertime they'd hired her for the press tour to organize the book signings and the author's public appearances his schedule they expected it to be full and busy and glowing as it had been for The Mountain and God and for Scentless they had been optimistic the blithe optimism born not of hope but of exception they had no reason to suspect that this new book would not be embraced that it would not be loved this was the face they put on though she could see the cracks from the very beginning the twinges of worry that there was something in those pages which people would reject and she wondered why. She the eternal worshiper the fan she knew that she would love this thing she did not have to see it to know and so she wondered at the cracks she judged them for the disguised shaking of their faith and then she met him the great author really met him and he said to her the first words he said to her spoken as though to a human

  -I should have burned the fucking thing / this is going to be ugly they'll crucify me for this one and I don't blame them.

  It was part of her job to find him the reviews every review ever written of one of his books and to read it to him so she spent her hours searching peering into the dull glow of the computer monitor and trolling the world for mention of her boss and she would read him every scrap from the literary magazines the newspapers every blog even the little local papers when she could track them down the ones that didn't even put their stories online you had to wait for somebody from the area to bring it up a pre-internet ritual of information distribution and alien to her who was used to access immediate and entire. In the first few months she found very little an article here an old review there and they would sit together in his office in New York sometimes they would do it over the phone him at home or at the school and she would read the words in a voice she hoped was even and without bias she would read no matter the tone or content. The reviews were mostly good and it was an easy enough task. Then Undertime was released.

  There was a party at the publisher's office on release day she was invited and at Naomi's insistence she went they went together both feeling out of place very young and very female. There was a strange atmosphere in the room the tension of taking a breath and preparing to leap into icy water an undercurrent of gradually developed disappointment and at the center of it was DC Glaser the writer half-drunk and eating he ate like he despised himself ate with a pathological need pawing up fistfuls of expensive hors d'oeuvre and pushing them desperately into his mouth and in the air was a music that consumed itself a music which refused to alight on the mind just wisped away like smoke when you tried to cock your ear to it that was the sort of party it was all surfaces and evasion. When he saw them across the room he laughed he came sweeping up on them wiping his hands on his jacket he came groaning under the weight of himself and he embraced her his breath reeking of whiskey. She saw Bradley standing in the back of the room with his phone against his head he caught her eye he shook his head with a sort of disgust directed at her or the author she couldn't say and he turned back to the corner and his phone. DC let her go and turned to Naomi who took a step back half-joking and half-nervous you must be Glaser she said her voice wryly distanced. He licked his lips

  -You know me?

  -Only by reputation.

  -Ah / the famous writer is it?

  -Just as her boss.

  -You've never read my books?

  -I don't read books.

  -No?

  -I'm sorry / seems a terrible thing to admit here doesn't it?

  -Not at all / it's refreshing / half the people here only read because they think it makes them look smart / the two-faced fuckers / not worth spit and don't know a fucking thing about real literature.

  -No?

  -All they know is what they're told to think / what they're paid to think more often than not.

  -And what about my Vanessa here what do you think of her?

  -Your Vanessa?

  -Mine.

  -Hell of a fucking woman.

  -I agree.

  -She reads for love / charming really / her kind is dying out.

  -Do you think so?

  -I've seen the studies / more than that I can feel it in the fucking air / on every stinking breath / mine is a vanishing art / why don't you read?

  -I'm an artist.

  -Ha.

  -Consumption is for the masses / pure creation requires the absence of context.

  -Now you're having me on.

  -Well why not / isn't everybody else?

  Vanessa had been just a little bit mortified by the whole conversation but when it was over DC had just laughed a hopeless resigned laugh and shuffled off back to the open bar for another shot of bourbon.

  The reviews were bad not just the worst of DC Glaser's career but some of the worst she'd ever seen any book receive. The critics hated the book that was plain enough no point sugar-coating it but more than that they seemed to take a perverse glee in raking the venerable old author over the coals holding his feet to the fire there was a sense a feeling in the reviews that the critics had always hated him and could finally now admit it like they'd just been humoring him all these years waiting for a chance to snap. He would not relent in regard to her assignment she still read the reviews to him. It became a torture a kind of grotesque masochistic ritual like a play almost a performance art flagellation. Here is the stage the little New York office sparsely furnished the corpulent author sitting in his chair with his duplicated chin heavy in his hands and the shade over his eyes making black pits of his sockets and the downward curve of the mouth which you can see even from way in the back row he is storming his silence thunderous and vast enter stage left the lissom black girl he takes no notice of her presence it seems but allows her to make her way to the seat on the other side of the desk where she opens her bag and withdraws sheets of fresh paper and a folder ragged with clippings and page fragments and you all lean in close to watch her organize her papers on the desk while you wait with quivering impatience for the first word of this one act piece to slip quietly out into the world. She takes a page from the folder and she begins with scarce preamble to read and now the words come in a horrible torrent spilling out not her words but the far-off rattling of a razor-eyed critic slivering their way into the dead corpse of Undertime. As she reads and the invective piles up like some bone-sheering automobile accident the author's body begins to sink into itself the shoulders slump the neck droops the chin sags the pouches beneath the eyes hang low the body is coming apart the skelet
on unfused by this mountain of disdain. And everybody is squirming in their seats wishing as she wished that he would stop her would say that's enough for now but it keeps coming this sad deluge. Her performance is arch and forced and full of pity it is that of the beaten dog which cannot for love of its cruel master bring itself to real anger though in the hollow width of the eye and the trembled hang of the lip there is the refrain constant loud and desperate no no it's not fair it's not fair it's not suppose to happen this way. The author makes his assistant read for hours or does it only feel like hours? when he releases her she is almost in tears and there she is at the door her hand on the twisting brass knob and he speaks

  -Have you read it?

  -I'm sorry?

  -Have you read the book? / Bradley told me you read them / you told me you read them / haven't given up on me have you?

  -I did.

  -You did / you gave up?

  -No no / I mean I read the book I did read it yes.

  -Undertime.

  -I bought it.

  -And?

  -And what sir?

  -You only call me sir when you're afraid of me / you didn't like it.

  -I'd rather not say one way or the other sir.

  -Ah.

  -But I haven't given up on you / no.

  And here at last he crumples he gives up the audience can see the light go out the eyes glaze over the voice go flat he seems to have slipped beyond he seems to be standing now behind frosted glass. She shuts the door quietly. Lights go out. Curtain comes down. Scene. A gentle smattering of applause the weary shuffle of feet as strangers find their way around each other towards the glowing red or green exit signs at the back of the room and somewhere in the dark of the stage hidden behind that swaying black cloth there is a man broken. The performance is over now and he must go back to his life but who is he now what is an actor without their character? He feels lost and absurd. In retrospect the whole thing seems fake and wrong the illusion of it is brought into sharper focus now and what had felt so real to him is now miserable and bleak. He licks his lips he moves his tongue and finds it stuck to the bottom of his mouth. He wanders backstage he does not speak to any of the crew nor any of the other performers he goes his silent way into the great dark of the brooding night and stands there on the sidewalk anonymous in the city and the headlights of the audience member's cars cut across him then slide away onto a rain-slicked highway sparing him no more thought than notice.

  Vanessa opens the last drawer there are three things inside the first two inconsequential a wrapper of mint chewing gum the kind he used to chew unwrap with his think fingers wispy paper coming away from a sugar-dusted strip of gum and also an unused notepad standard spiral-bound which after a cursory flip through proves to be quite empty. The last item in the drawer is a heavy binder thick and crowded with material the pages loose and numerous and densely scribbled upon some of them even typed final product she turns it over in her hands tucks the pages back inside without opening it she feels the weight of it which is a considerable weight and there is a rising joy in her a desire pulsing through her she is sure quite sure that this is it this is what they have been searching for she holds it ready to open but hesitates. She remembers the last time she spoke to DC Glaser only ten days ago now.

  That day. She woke to find Naomi packing rushing in some frenzy her clothing askew and her blond hair wild a ribbon tied about her ankle which she seems not to notice and her things are disappearing one by one into heavy suitcases by the door all of their life together being erased moment by moment Vanessa begged her pleaded through the grimy caul of sleep please don't go not like this stay with me please where are you going but Naomi would not speak she did not have to speak Vanessa had felt it coming on for weeks like a rising dread them both hating each other more and more disgust injected into love until love itself is reviled and then Naomi is out of Vanessa's tearing clutching fingers out the door out onto the street and gone. Eight hours later Vanessa went to DC Glaser. He sat at his desk with his pen in his hand bent in earnest labor over his words and his eyes lit when he saw her. She could feel the tug of him the almighty hunger his pen twitched she could feel it he wanted her story wanted to feed off her sadness her eyes were red and her throat shut and her cheeks wet with his hunger for her. All that was in him wanted her and she wanted nothing more than to curl up at his feet and tell her story let it escape in rushes and gasps. He wanted to eat her story for himself. She took a step towards him and stopped. No no this is my story she cried inside herself you cannot have it! His face softened he shook his head his pen went back to scribbling and he said one word kindly spoken and gracefully given a gentle spell invoked. He said Go.

  Vanessa opens the folder and there on the first page in those same pen strokes look it is the same page she knows the familiar paper the memory comes back to her now she holds in her hands the title page he was scratching out that day in his office when Naomi broke her heart when she saw him last there are the words writ large in his familiar hand.

  The Cannibal's Prayer.

  The Cannibal's Prayer

  Joanna sits at the author's desk with her palms against her eyes like a child blotting out the world and always somehow surprised delighted to see that it is all still there still radiant light still deathless color and shape when your eyes are uncovered and you again see.

  The naked manuscript is shapeless in her hands the bulk of the paper heavy and amorphous it bends to the will of gravity it has no strength and no form of its own she strokes the pages with her thumb. This is life. And all around her David's office flowering with memory and emotion brought back long since buried under time.

  And your beautiful life is all here for them to see to hear to touch. And from your mouth secrets grow and wither on the vine never to be heard.

  Joanna turns through the pages and the writing there is swallowed by her own memory and she keeps reading even after her eyes are full of tears and she cannot see the words through water. All of their lives are inside of her here.

  She is in her thirties she sits on the floor with a bottle of wine under the crook of one arm her bare toes massaging the carpet her bare cheek pressed against the cool windowpane and the clack of the typewriter fills the room he looks at her and smiles she smiles back this is love here in this room filling all of the world their new home their new place in the world to her it feels so right so whole she watches him write the wine is pleasantly bitter on her tongue he writes until he cannot and he frowns at the page and she rises to cross the room and wrap her arms around his neck he asks her to read it to tell him what she thinks of it and she does she leans forward and types the first sentence of the next paragraph and looks at him with one eyebrow cocked he reads it and laughs thank you sweetheart he says and brushes a kiss against her cheek you're right you're right that's it he laughs she smiles she hugs him feels the warmth of his body filling her the sunset is streaming red and gold through the window and they are here creating together and there ink-wet on the page is their child taking slow shape taking form coming into the world now they look into each other's eyes and smile this is real this is real love.

  She is in her forties and furious with him he stands tight-lipped at the window clutching his hands his eyes shadowed over and dull and unseeing why won't he talk to her is this a punishment it isn't her fault and she tells him so he grunts don't shut me out she says and comes closer puts a hand on his shoulder he shrugs her away she shuts her eyes shuts her lips you're like a child she says forget it just forget it I can't do this anymore I just can't they have been fighting it seems to her for years over everything she cannot bear it she tells him that she wants to leave him god she wishes she'd never met him he just shrugs the shrug says fine then go then leave and she curses him and sinks into the chair across the room and she watches him look out his window until he too sits comes to rest with a gentle sigh and they stare at each other across the room and across that distance which seems now immeasurably wide.

&nb
sp; She is in her fifties and burning with love outside the wide window is a world blackened by night so deep and distant it feels as though they are alone absolutely alone in all the universe the twinkling of fluid moonlight across the lake is like the shine of far distant stars and she wraps her arms around his neck he turns from the typewriter and kisses her gently on the lips then again harder she touches his cheek she sinks into his arms and into his lips and into him his fingers tug at the straps of her nightgown her breath short and sharp as she fumbles with his belt and she reaches inside and when she touches him she moans and shudders he sweeps the papers off his desk shoves the typewriter aside he lifts her onto the desk and presses himself to her and into her she wraps her arms around his head and draws him to her breast I love you I love you I love you.

  She is in her sixties and he is so tired he stares eyes bloodshot fingers trembling breathing in his throat he is so much older than his years his mouth sags his whole body sags he looks at her and smiles when she comes inside carrying a tall glass of cold very cold milk in her hands and it is a tired smile a smile worn out by overuse in distant youth thank you honey he says his voice stretched she stands beside him above him and puts his arm around her waist puts his head against her belly oh sweetie he says it is the voice of a man beat down she strokes his thinning hair don't worry darling don't worry it'll come I'm sure it will come she says but he does not seem to care he just holds her and when he drinks the milk it is cold as anything on his tongue.

  She remembers and the memory eclipses the words on the page and she finds that her gaze has wandered across the room wandered to the window where just outside in the shrub is a little brown bird bobbing and blinking and hopping from branch to branch. The fragile thing with a twig in its beak twitching when it moves alighting with boundless energy we are such sluggish things earthbound and lethargic. She yawns. She turns back to the book and finds that she has been turning pages that she is now lost hopelessly at the midpoint. She reads from the top of the page.

  back from the window to look at him. "Why did you write this?"

  "For you. For me. I don't know. I needed to write it, needed it like I haven't needed anything in so long. You know what it's like when there's something in you, just burning in your stomach and you need to get it out. I needed to make this, for my sanity."

  She seemed to mull that over. "When you died, I..."

  "Yes?" He moved, shapeless and formless, a gust of thought, of pure energy.

  "Why did you come back, David? For me? For the book?"

  "I came back because I had to come back."

  "That doesn't mean anything."

  "I just wanted to leave something behind. The book is..."

  "You've written other books. What's so special about this one?"

  "I shouldn't have waited so long." The ghost wavered in the half-light, its shape ineffable, its form elusive, silvan in the evening murk. There was a deep melancholy in its voice.

  "Waited for what, David?"

  "I shouldn't have waited so long to be the person I wanted to be. I let myself be pulled in so many directions. And now it's too late..."

  "Too late for what? David, I don't understand what you want me to do."

  "It all started with the movie. The film."

  Joanna looked at the light switch on the wall. She wondered what might happen if she were to flick it on. Would the shadow of her husband be banished in the light, scuttle away like a rat in the dark? What would she see? "What film?"

  "You know the film. The movie they made based on my book. Another Mountain."

  "But you never watched it."

  "Yes I did. Slunk into the theater in a disguise - as if anybody would have recognized me! - sat in the back and watched through dark glasses. It was this little theater in college-town, played all the artsy foreign stuff, you know the type. I was sitting there in the dark and watching my story be told and I was looking at the faces of the people there... all kids, these young people in their twenties and thirties. They were so... fantastical, they were beautiful and there were so many of them. I was looking at them and I remember thinking: this is it, this is the future. They were the kind of kids who might, you know, they might pick up a book every once in a while, some popular young adult book or the New Yorker approved literature of the season. They might read, but they weren't readers. They didn't really care about books, and why should they? That theater, that screen... the place was holy to them. I could see it in their faces, that this was were they came to experience art. This was where they came to transcended themselves. They were the artists of the future, and they didn't care about books. Nothing of what I'd devoted my life meant anything to them, it was all going to fall away. There are still going to be books, probably always will be... but they won't be special, there won't be any fire in them. It will all be just media, all commerce. It will all come down to just commercial novels and commercial literature. There's no place for art in writing anymore, no goddamn audience for it!

  "So I watched that movie and, as much as I wanted to hate it... well, it was better. It was better than what I'd written. I felt myself getting lost in it, all of us there in the theater together, we were all caught up in something bigger than ourselves. It was a collective thing, an awakening. I felt like they were all my brothers and sisters in there, all of us children of the same mother. Did you know a woman directed the film? I hadn't known that, never bothered to find out. Strange...

  "I was ashamed when I saw my name up there. It wasn't mine, none of it was mine. And, my God, the credits! They went on and on, so many damn people. How did they make something that beautiful with so many people all getting their fingers in it? I couldn't have done that, never could work with anybody else. Nobody but you, once...

  "Book are so solitary. So fucking lonely! It's such a quiet thing, reading a book, and a thousand times worse writing one. I feel like a... I don't know... a cannibal living in the woods, creeping into the city in the middle of the night to snatch some unsuspecting person, drag the body back out to the darkness and gnaw it to the bones. That's what I've made myself! When you read there is nothing, only silence and the words, words words words until you could choke on them.

  "Watching that movie, I felt like God. Not the god that people imagine, the real God, the God of the bible, that jealous bastard. Have I ever told you how I feel about God? That prick, that fucking broken thing. God is so powerful and so vast that he doesn't even know what he is anymore. God wishes he was one of us, that's why he hates us so much, why he punishes us like he does. For all our flaws, for all our mistakes, we still have beauty, we have love. God can't love. God has no equal, no peers. God can't love. God can only despise and hate us for our smallness. I can't bear to die, to really die and be gone from this world. I'm so frightened of what he will do to be when he has my soul in his hands.

  "In that theater I felt... removed. Like I was alone, and beyond. I was seeing something that I'd created be transformed, be made better by a group of people I despised, a group of people who were nothing to me, who were not as good as me. And they'd done it better, wrenched more real feeling out of the thing than I'd ever done. It was everything I'd been afraid of. I gave them the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil and they ate it and it did not destroy them. It's a fruit that God cannot eat. God does not know good and evil, and neither did I. My knowledge is so imperfect, so hermetic. I'm so lost in myself.

  "I've opened my veins onto my pages, Joanna! I've opened my goddamn veins!"

  She almost reaches out to touch him. "What are you afraid of, then? Isn't that what you wanted? To put feeling into the world?"

  "I'm just afraid that it's the wrong kind of feeling. I wonder if I've only ever driven people apart. Maybe that's all books can do. They shut us down, close our minds against the rest of the world. Reading a book is like being trapped in a prison. It's... blinding."

  "What do you want, David?"

  "I don't know exactly. I... I guess I'm sorry."

&n
bsp; "No, David, I -"

  "Please, don't try to make me feel better. This has been lonely for you, hasn't it? Our marriage, I mean, it's been lonely. But I don't know how to do anything else. Being alone is the only thing I can do well. It's the only thing I was ever good at."

  Joanna sits on the edge of the dock with the manuscript in her hands she touches the dock the cracked wood the black wood washed by water for longer than she had lived there in that low stone house beneath the trees.

  Spring has come pushed itself up through the last white crusts of frost flowering and sprouting and blooming madly with all the fury and energy of life and here around her as she sits there on dead wood the world is coming alive. It is a new chapter in the book of nature. A book of true things.

  Vanessa stands just on the shore.

  Joanna watches the light of the sunset like fire upon the shifting water. She touches the pages of the manuscript this last manuscript.

  Vanessa comes down the length of the dock and waits there on the edge of the world suspended between the sky and the water and in both is gleaming the sunset light.

  -So / what are we going to do?

  -About what?

  -About the book of course / DC's book / should I call Bradley?

  -No not Bradley / I don't think so.

  -You're not thinking of giving it to someone else are you?

  -Nothing like that no / I just don't know yet.

  -Did you read the whole thing?

  -I did.

  -It's not complete.

  -No not complete / not entirely.

  -But is it enough?

  -Enough for what? / to make money? / yes I suppose it is / people would buy it / they'd read it / maybe for a while it might be like he was alive again / in their minds he would be alive again / a real ghost a real prayer / words from an after-life.

  -It's strange though isn't it? / not like anything else he wrote?

  -I suppose it is / he wanted to make a new self before he died / just like David / always searching for eternal life / I can't think why.

  -You wouldn't want to live forever?

  -I can't think of anything worse / defeats the whole purpose.

  -Purpose of what?

  -Of life.

  -Hm.

  -Who was it who said that the goal of all life is death / something like that.

  -I think it was Freud.

  -Hm.

  -Is that was you really believe Joanna?

  -It is / I just don't quite know what it means / is that silly?

  -I don't think so.

  -What are you going to do now / now that it's over.

  -I'm going back to New York / I'm not sure what I'll do.

  -Are you afraid?

  -Life goes on / I'll find something / drop into some pattern / we all do.

  -David was wrong you know.

  -About what?

  -About books / about loneliness.

  -How so?

  -A book is a way into another person's soul / it's a window or a door / David only ever saw the walls / he never looked through.

  -So what are you going to do with it?

  -I'm going to let him go.

  -And you / are you going to keep writing?

  -I think I have to / I've got to at least see if I can make something / thank you by the way / for everything you did.

  -I didn't do anything.

  Joanna reply is unspoken hanging there between them glimmering and written silver in the sky. Vanessa sits beside her on the dock the two women trail their bare toes in the water and they kiss each other softly shy as schoolgirls for what reason neither can say. They kiss somehow knowing that they will never see each other again on this earth.

  Joanna has a match in her hand. She strikes it on the boards of the dock and lights the title page on fire. The Cannibal's Prayer, by DC Glaser. The two women watch as the flame eats through the paper eats through the words eats through everything. So it's a cremation in the end. They light the second page in the ashes of the first and on and on in an endless chain. They let go the cindered pages now on their wings of hungry flame to flutter out across the lake between the sun and the sea. Charred fragments drift like ghosts across the surface of the little pond and the words ascend upward and out burning toward the horizon past the roof of the little stone house past the heavy limbs of the trees past the arch of the setting sun and before they have come to the final page night has fallen and fire burns in darkness the burning words are the only illumination and when they are gone there is only night and ash and all the stars are in the water and all the words have gone to heaven raised like a prayer to something ancient and sightless and beyond the corruption of thought or time.

  Exit

  It's strange, isn't it?

  You want to think that every day has meaning, that your life is precious in every moment. The truth is that most days are wasted. We let them slip through our fingers; we hardly even notice it happening. In the end there are only a few moments which really matter, only a few events in the course of our existences that truly shape us. Most time is wasted.

  Joanna Glaser - Joanna Cook, if you prefer - is dead. Though of course the argument could be made, I suppose, that Joanna still exists, somewhere out there in the ether of the human unconscious.

  I heard that she died peacefully. Died with grace and dignity, crumpled like an old flower into her lover's arms. Sudden failure of the body to sustain itself. Like a light switch being thrown, and all the world slips into darkness. What fragile biology.

  It's been six years now since I stayed with Joanna at the little stone house up in the hills of Upstate New York. They've been strange years for me, and stranger still for her, I imagine. Well, that's life, strange as anything and then over. I still remember that time fondly, when I think back to it. It was, I think, one of those formative moments, the kind that shapes a person. It was for both of us.

  We kept in touch for a year or two after, the occasional e-mail, a long phone call now and then, bits and pieces of ephemera. We never saw each other again in the flesh, though I suppose that's in some ways appropriate. That's what a really great book does, after all, separates the mind from the body, frees the spirit to wander pathways of time and personalty. A great book is like great sex. It is an escape from being. So I guess DC's last novel was, in the end, a great book, if only for us, and for him. Perhaps we were selfish. I sometimes feel guilty, I think of us burning those pages on the dock and I wonder what we could have been thinking. I only ever got to read a few sections of the novel, and they've mostly faded from my mind since. I remember only scratches now, just a few fragments, a few images and turns of phrase.

  God knows what Bradley would have said if he knew what happened that day. Poor Bradley, I think it broke his heart a little that he never got to read it. In the end he violated his own rule: he really cared about DC Glaser's novels. He let them mean something to him. Was it wrong of us to deny him that book? Maybe it was. How many books came close to dying unheard? How many classics? I'm of two minds; on the one hand it seems wrong to take something of meaning out of the world, to bury or muffle something which might touch people, might mean something to them. But those books die slow deaths, they get pinned down and cut open. Like an autopsy which never ends, a corpse pawed at and prodded until you can hardly see any shape of life left in the thing. Prayer escaped that fate, out-flew it on flaming wings over the still lake. A good death, I think, and clean.

  Joanna did eventually finish her own book, nearly a year later. Bradley wanted it, of course, practically begged her for it. She turned him down, ended up releasing it through a tiny little indie press, one of those paper-back publishers nestled in the shadow of the college. She sent me a copy, though I never got up the nerve to read it. I was too afraid of finding myself inside it. She sent me a copy of each of the other three books she wrote before she died. I've got them on my shelf at home. Pristine, a mind waiting to open. Maybe I'll read them now that she's gone. Maybe some
quiet evening I'll find myself touching the spines and tracing my fingers over the imprint of her name there: Joanna Cook. Like a secret language. She probably only ever sold a couple hundred copies, if that. I'll take it down and open it and I'll let the words wash over me and she will be alive again.

  Bradley never understood. It frustrated him, I think, to see those books "languish." Joanna was dooming herself, he thought. In his eyes she had failed. The mind changes slowly. The blood-black pages of life's tumultuous book. Survival of the fittest, the creature who breeds most wins. Aren't we beyond that? Isn't it enough just to know that you have been? That you once were? What does it matter if you are never seen, never appreciated by the yawning masses. Life is such a beautifully worthless thing, and we keep putting value on it, putting prices on it. I think that Joanna succeeded. DC too, in the end.

  Poor David. I still miss him, his big laugh that filled the room and made you want to laugh yourself. I miss his words.

  I thought about going to Joanna's funeral, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Maybe somebody somewhere is looking for her lost pages, trying to gather some scrap of her before she's altogether gone. I just hope that she's resting easy.

  I married a sweet girl. Life with her is slow and lazy and beautiful.

  Sometimes I write, little secret scribbles. Someday maybe they'll be found and somebody will care. Probably not. My wife doesn't have much interest in any of that, doesn't even read novels much, or poetry. But we write for each other, little phrases that mean everything to us, lines and sentences which, across the gentle curve of our shared time, take on a dimension beyond their meaning. We write to each other in our own private language, and through it we know a kind of love that is uniquely our own. We brush clumsily against something which is endless and nameless, something for which there are no words.

 

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