Same Same

by Peter Mendelsund

  Fyi this is not an exhaustive list obvs, and there are so many other important considerations; the question of social criticism, the nature and flavor of novelistic causality, the mandate to exclude authorial motive, not to mention the whole question of what manner of language is employed, and under which circumstances (specifically w/r/t the correct ratio of colorful to workmanlike language [luminous to ordinary prose, so on*]). I do hope to return to some of these questions soon and eventually decant my conclusions into a new set of Fundaments, a set of “Post Hoc Fundaments,” which will describe the principles I will have employed in order to have completed the project.

  Either way, I do hope that the key to all of this, all of it, is my arriving at some real, palpable feel for my main character. “My guy,” as I think of him (he is still as yet unnamed). It’s been explained to me that I should feel him out, get to “know” him.

  The key is, clearly: him.

  (If I could just see him, or understand the inner workings of his mind…If he only weren’t so inscrutable.)

  Still, the project accumulates.

  Every day there is more and more of it. It builds in bulk, the project, strangely, even when I am doing nothing. I remain troubled by this fact: that I’ve no memory of ever having made some of it; writtin written most of it, that is. I mean written it down, personally. As I’ve previously intimated, there is, undeniably, material that I’ve created unbeknownst to me. Without my being involved in the slightest. This last bit is a true mystery. When did I? How? By what means? Were the Fundaments employed? Idk. It is all, at this point, anyone’s guess. I won’t let it bother me. I simply join up this writing-of-unknown-origin w/ my own; join it up with tape, or staples, or string, paste (copy and paste), so forth. All that matters here, as far as the Institute is concerned, is that progress is being made—that I’m wiring (ach, writing) and that the word count and the page count are growing, and I am hoping (vainly, perhaps) that I only require time to shuffle it all about and carve it all down into something a bit more meaningful. Progress is progress; I don’t wish to have it interrupted.

  Ping!

  Okay. No worries.

  Take a look: don’t get exercised. We’ve worked on this.

  Calm thoughts.

  A gap.

  (THE GAP)

  The dusty glare under the dome is now too much to endure without sunglasses, so I put them on. The world clicks into brown.

  Writing time is over for now, so, it is out the door and down the stucco steps.

  I find, as I walk the hot and palm-lined paths toward the Presence Center, that all I can think about these days is water. I am constantly parched, and until the Institute’s thermostats and turbines are running normally again, it will remain this way. I contemplate the idea, for a moment, of deviating over to the grove, in order to splash some of its fountain water over me, to cool off in it, maybe take a surreptitious slurp of it. Slake this ferocious bloody thirst. But then decide better of it. The water is not great in this part of the world in general, I remind myself—I’d been warned about the water. And certainly, fountain water is non-potable, just swimming with bacteria. I’ll have to wait. But water, water…

  Then I am barged directly into by a man coming down the path in the opposite direction from me, whom I hadn’t seen coming. A fellow. (A new one? Have we inducted new fellows, already? And under these circumstances?) It looked as if he had lowered his shoulder in an attempt to body-check me off the walkway.

  “Hey!” I shouted at his taupe-colored back.

  “Dunce,” he rejoined. “Look where you are fucking going.”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said, but he was already gone.

  At which point a woman who is equally unfamiliar to me approaches as if to politely ask me directions whereupon I cock my head inquisitively, and she leans in, vivid with grievance, and violently sputters. Some of her words are lost to me, as if she were speaking in a foreign tongue, and perhaps she is, but some of it makes sense including the phrase: “you missed the debriefing.”

  To which I reply:

  “Do I know you, madam?”

  To which she replies:

  “You are not even being serious.”

  “I think you may have me confused for someone else.”

  “You are someone else.”

  (Could this be one of the Institute’s “unscheduled interventions” I have heard of?)

  “I’m sorry not to be able to receive your prompt today,” I say, shrugging with regret and offering the official Institute-sanctified deferral, “but I haven’t the time right now.”

  “I am afraid.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but—”

  “I am afraid that my head is a hand.”

  “Uh—”

  “You make me puke.”

  “Yes, all right, there isn’t any need for—”

  “I need you to understand.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Come here.”

  And she gets up very, very close, and I’m not sure whether she’s going in for a smooch, or head butt (either option is horrifying, to say the least), and shrieks.

  “!”

  Reacting quickly, I shove her aside, hand catching then slipping, briefly, on the shoulder of her loose tunic, revealing one motion-blurred, mottled, and baggy breast, and I scurry away, afraid to look back lest she be following me, her spittle and wormy breath on my neck; and she is gone now.

  It’s deteriorating. Denatured.

  All of it.

  (But, I think, but. These unusual exchanges might just work as “scenes” for my project. Tbd.)

  I stop in the blue shade of a palm (not the shadow of its trunk, which is narrow and long, but rather in the shadow of its high leaves, which makes a dark, roughly round stain upon the lawn, just my size, trunk trailing off like the fuse of a bomb), and I try to catch my breath.

  I’m so thirsty. Where will I get water? Looking up, I see that the sky has turned white in the heat. White even in my sunglasses. The sun reaching the apex of its traverse. I have to get indoors (indoors-indoors that is) before I become dehydrated and burnt. The bacteria-laden fountain is seeming more appealing by the minute.

  My sweat begins to run into my eyes, blinding me, and I pull my tunic up to squeegee it off of my face, and then I hear a familiar voice.

  “Oh god, Miss Fairfax. I have been looking for you.”

  “It’s too hot, Percy. You should get indoors. Poor thing.”

  And she hands me a glass, beaded with cool condensation.

  Water. I drink and suddenly the Institute, and Miss Fairfax, and the project, all begin to mean very little to me. I allow the heavenly cold to dispel the desert, the heat, the anxiety, everything. All of it. As my body contracts into the pure satisfaction of need.

  Aaaaaahhhhhh.

  Gap.

  Later, I’m standing alone by the window of my flat, looking out over the blue grounds, naked but for my shorts, feeling the warm currents—carrying the faintest whiff of disinfectant—flowing over my skin. The bellows of my body does its tireless work. I’m not sure how long I’ve been standing here. Some of the lights are flickering far off, which could be micro-drones, or malfunctioning lights on the metastructure, or they could even be the strobes of distant stars, though this seems unlikely. Most of the campus outside my room is pooling in darkness. Something is happening at the Institute. “Possibilities are opening up here, lines are just beginning to blur,” Dennis said. The evening is blurring everything, and all I can make out is a motley alphabet of possible shapes. It is quite lovely, actually.

  There is a very strong wind out of the south. Disturbingly, some sand has entered the Institute. It is the first time this has happened.

  Paper, sure, but now sand.

 
Dennis was right, that boundaries would blur; now they have, quite literally: blurred. The delineation of the Institute from the wilderness which surrounds it is now definitively smudged. Outside, inside; inside, outside.

  Outside? We are going out soon. Out there again. All of us. There is to be another outing. Soon. Not mandatory, but recommended. Strongly recommended.

  “Team building. Good for morale. Esprit de corps.”

  Another excursion for the fellows. With any luck.

  Get us away from

  the paper

  our work for a moment.

  More souks. A formal tea, in a white tent, out in the inky dunes. Out in the desert, which turns practically lunar at night.

  A formal tea—served by women in robes. In the local manner.

  White tents. White robes.

  Tea.

  Out by the massed-up clouds.

  Rocks. Blue sand.

  Then a group photo. In a couple of days. Or a matter of weeks. Weather pending.

  So be it. It will give me something to write about.

  For now, I hide in my room, between the metal railing of my cot’s headboard and the particleboard armoire.

  The pilled woolen blanket over my head; listening to the sounds of general movement. Of life going on without me. And I remember it, and wribe it down, record it for later use.

  (BACK AGAIN)

  Ps. I have begun to develop a cast. A motley assemblage of character types. A scholar, a rake, a functionary, an authority figure, a femme fatale…They are all ported into the thing from other places of course, but are performing the work allotted them decently, despite their new milieu (not in the sense that they feel “real,” of course. They don’t and that is dandy). My protagonist, though. My protagonist. He continues to prove elusive. So I’ve made a decision. A rather important one, Btw. I’ve determined that the central character in my work, “my guy,” that is—as all novels must, one presumes, have a “guy” in the middle of things; a locus for the material, a hero of sorts—that he must be endowed with some definitive qualities; he must be rendered in greater detail than the others. Moreover, the easiest route for me, in terms of establishing these very granular qualities, would be to settle on an Irl model for my protagonist to take after—a real someone, that is, upon whom his fictional characteristics could be predicated, organized, and grounded. So the decision is this: that I will found his personality upon the bedrock of my own. Physical characteristics as well. As one does. An auto-fiction. The simplest way forward, I believe. Least work-intensive. Most surefire. See, I have no powers of imagination, no resourcefulness when it comes to invention (as things stand). No, I’m resigned to it. I just can’t “summon” him. He does not respond to my call. So what better way around the conundrum than to simply perform a small substitution, me for him. (I will even name him “Percy.”) I mean, no one will be any the wiser, and at least the depiction I will henceforth draw (of “my guy”) will bear all the necessary hallmarks of verisimilitude. Using this surefire method, I will mimesis the hell out of this protagonist. This “Percy” of mine will simply drip with reality.

  Starting with his face. Here we go:

  Face is variable. Situational. Depends on lighting obvs. Time of day. Angle of approach. But a thumbnail sketch would surely include the rather severe narrowness. Have a bit of a horse-face frankly, all length, escarping precipitously back from the ridge of the long nose. Eyes are close-set behind thick-framed tortoiseshell glasses.

  Hairline eroding; the expanse of forehead gaining ground with the tide of days. Though I am not old. (Not young either.) And let it be known that I am not handsome. Some women have told me that I am handsome, but I’m not; and there is no accounting for what some women like or will tell you that they like. I’m vain and I try to manage my appearance, but I’m not attractive. Objectively I’m not. Not hideous either. Just not beautiful. I’m not tall either. My max morning height differs somewhat from my diminished minimum evening height by virtue of that tariff imposed by gravity, and of course we all diminish, also, with age, and it is as if life can only but deflate us; and only an extinction has the power to replenish our stature; either those nightly extinctions called sleep which elongate us on our beds, or that final extinction where the constriction of our bonds, our tendons and ligaments and fleshy matter, finally releases with a sigh of arrival, and our bones drift apart at last and we expand out to our acme, a height and breadth, albeit horizontal, we were destined for.