Scene 1
“Tater, please, listen to me,” she implored with a subterranean chill in her voice. She pushed an auburn forelock back into her bandana, her callused fingers stained twenty shades of humus. “If I don’t get a fair price for these turnips, Tap says I’ll be pushing up carrots. You gotta help me.”
Tater stood with his hands on his waist, arms as akimbo as a pump-handle. His voice was gentle but firm. Deep down he admired her, but he loathed the sucker she worked for. He seemed to just pull the life out of her. “First of all, Ginger, you tell ol’ garlic breath that if he lays one finger on you, I’ll beat him to a pulp. Now, that being said,
“I can only give you rock bottom for these turnips. I’m as broke as dirt and he knows it. If he don’t like that answer, tell him I said he can go pound—”
Shcreeeeeee!!!!
Uninvited, the espresso machine pronounced its phlegmy dominion over the writers huddled in the coffee nook of Mille-feuille Books.
“Dammit, Bennett!” Lance slapped his journal shut. “Can you find us another place in the store to meet? That brew monster wreaks havoc with all my lofty dialog.”
Bennett smiled as he sat back from the edge of his chair. “Seriously! I’ll see what I can do, Lance. You want to keep going?”
“No, man,” Lance shrugged his shoulders. “I need momentum to hit those punch lines. It’s not as easy as it looks.”
“I get that,” Bennett laughed. “I will say, however, that you’re moving the story right along, and the characters keep getting more vivid. And your visuals—they’re really coming on strong. Still thinking about the title?”
Lance beamed back at Bennett. “Yeah, still leaning towards ‘The Roots of All Evil’. But being a farm noir set among permaculturists, I’m also thinking about calling it ‘Buzz…Kill.’ What strikes you?”
A group chuckle pre-empted Bennett’s reply. He waited for the laughter to subside. “There, you have your answer. Both titles get our attention!” He looked around the table. “Okay, Lance here yields his time to whoever is next. So who’s up?”
The answer came buzzing through a speaker overhead: “Bennett, please come to the Order Desk for a moment.”
Bennett responded with a grimacing facepalm. “I think I’ll find another place to work, too! Sorry guys, I’m the MOD tonight. I’ll be right back.” He tossed his journal onto the table, lifted his leg over the back of the chair, and trotted across the store.
“Okay, but why don’t you read next?” Gwen called after him. She scanned the faces at the table. “I could use a little break, how about you guys?”
She was answered by the scraping of library chairs on the distressed plank floor and the irregular drop of composition books onto the table. The six members of the loosely organized group spread in different directions, some to the restrooms, a couple out to smoke, and others to the counter to elicit more espresso wheezing.
Meeting weekly over the past five years, the group had become an open and trusting band of friends. They each welcomed critique and bore it well. They felt that if one of them hit the big time, it was a win for all of them. Trust between them had become so great that they didn’t hesitate to leave their table unattended, though it held purses, laptops, and a mountain of journals. Their café table, however, was an island in a sea of invidiousness.
Slowly the group reconvened, sipping drinks and catching up on each others’ lives. Bennett made his way from the Order Desk. He paused near the Cooking section to greet an old friend.
“Hey, Martin! It’s good to see you! Did you come to sit in tonight?” He motioned over to his merry band of scribes.
Martin smiled warmly. “No, I just came to do a little work. I get a mite stale staying in all evening.”
He patted the satchel thrown over his shoulder, bulging with papers and books. “I was asked to make another round of edits on the food culture proposal. But thanks for the invitation. Please, remind me again how often you and your fellow writers meet?”
“Weekly, same place, seven PM. You’re welcome any time.” Bennett caught some eager faces out of the corner of his eye. “But hey, looks like the gang is getting restless, so I need to get back to the circle. We need to meet for coffee and catch up. Lots to talk about!”
“Yes, certainly. I’ll see you soon, Bennett,” Martin said distractedly as he pulled out a new title by Hervé This. He flipped through its pages, then disappeared among the bookshelves, seeking a quiet nook and an overstuffed chair.
Bennett speed-walked back to the table. He pulled out his chair and sat down.
“So, Bennett, who’s that?” asked Kurt, speaking for the impatient group.
“Oh, sorry about that, guys. He’s an old friend of mine, a writer himself, somewhat vexed with his own brilliance.”
“Aren’t we all!” grinned Lance. “So what’s his variety?”
“He published a book a few years ago, and of course we have it here. I’ll bring a copy next week and read you an excerpt. His work can be a bit challenging, to be honest. I think someone once called him ‘esoteric yet approachable,’ which is a kiss of death, I guess.”
“Ugh, that’s got to be hard to bear,” opined Evie, the group’s designated poet laureate.
Bennett continued, “I’ve never known anyone who researches as much as he does. Man, he gets the most obscure and arcane information! It’s all relevant, all meaningful, but he just leaves me bewildered now and then. He’s definitely not in the mainstream.”
“Well, that would apply to most of us,” offered Gwen sympathetically. “Why doesn’t he sit in now and then?”
Bennett nodded his agreement. “Yeah, but for some folks, writing is an intensely solitary process. I know lots of writers who’ll never read anyone a work in progress. That’d be like exposing a seedling to harsh temperatures. You have to harden the plant first, slowly introducing it to the big bad world outside the greenhouse.”
“Lance should do that with his turnip jokes,” said Kurt with a grin. “Maybe they’d come out a little better developed!” He gave Lance a brotherly punch in the arm. It was returned, double strength.
“Okay, look boys, settle down,” scolded Gwen. “Now, Bennett, what do you have for us?”
Bennett scanned the table for his journal, but it wasn’t to be seen. He reached behind his chair and pulled his canvas bag around. He immediately noticed it was lighter than usual. He furrowed his brow and surveyed the faces around him.
“Hey, where’s my journal? I swear I put it in here before I left home. I thought I took it out already,” he mumbled as he sorted through the stack on the table again.
Kurt began rummaging on the table, too. “It was one of those flashy new red ones, right?”
Bennett’s anxiety began to rise. “Okay, guys, joke’s up. Let me have my journal back.”
“I don’t have it,” Gwen answered, quite honestly.
“Me neither,” concurred Lance.
In turn, they all denied having the book, being too protective about their own work to fool with someone else’s.
“I tell you, it was in my bag when I got to the store this morning. I hope I didn’t lose it anywhere. Geez, it was some of my best work to date.” Bennett’s usually carefree face showed confusion mixed with worry.
Scene 2
The moon stalked the casement window, easily overpowering the dim lamp on the desk inside. A light breeze slithered across the sill, ushering October’s chill into another solitary evening.
Elongated shadows flowed across a red journal, lying open on a distressed desk. Turning a page, the man let his agitation flow through his red pen.
“Damn!” he muttered as he stabbed at the page. Red slashes eliminated entire sentences. Carets erupted recklessly, injecting themselves unwelcomingly into perfectly formed and economic prose. The page’s margins overflowed with commentary begun, crossed-out, and resumed. A giant serpentine scribble darted voraciously from the upper right to the lower left of the page.
“What is it about his writing? He’s a simpleton, yet his writing moves! I’ve had enough!” He gripped the right hand side of the page, viciously ripping it out by its roots. Delighted by his own outburst, he convulsed his way through the remaining pages, stopping only when they were all balled up at his feet.
He stood and let the harrowed binding fall with a dead thud on the oaken floor. Random planks creaked as he walked to the window.
“What does one do with such a person?” he mused into the full moonlight. He pushed his hands through his hair, clasped them behind his head, and breathed quietly and deeply. He closed his eyes.
“I just don’t even know. If he is what the world wants, then I am adrift in a sea of incompetence. I should just …”
He turned towards the desk and reached for the lamp’s pull chain, hesitating suddenly before clicking it off.
“Wait a minute…”
He knelt down and picked up a crumpled page. He placed it on the desk and flattened it out, smoothing the dominant creases by rolling them over the desk’s edge. He reached for another page, then scooped them all into his cupped arms. One by one he spread them and stacked them into a neat but ragged pile. He resisted the urge to put them back into their original order. To him that seemed a bit obsessive.
He laid the ruptured journal on top of its pages, as if it were a paperweight. With a quick jerk he turned off the lamp.
Annoyed by the moon’s persistence, he impatiently released the blinds. They rumbled and clattered, punctuated by the slamming of the door.
Scene 3
“Hey, got a moment?” Gwen read aloud, embodying her main character.
“I need to tell ya somethin’. It’s about those gophers, man, talk about trouble. They’re always poppin’ up in the middle of my bizness—you know what a hassle that is? Now you might think ol’ Frank here has crossed a line, that he’s bein’ a speciesist. Say what ya will, but I’m just tellin’ it like it is. And trust me kids, I got no reason to lie to ya.”
Giggles circulated around the table as her light, wispy voice struggled to emulate a four-packs-a-day rasp. Martin, sitting in for the first time, looked on bemused. Gwen continued.
“But ya wanna know who really locks my jaw? It’s those moles. They have an underground network or somethin’, like a bunch o’ spies. Don’t ever trust ‘em. I’d tell you more but your parents are prolly in the room.”
Gwen closed her comp book and looked at the group. Her foggy anxiety dissipated in the warmth of appreciative countenances.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked, regaining her own persona. “I know it needs illustrations, but is there enough in the text itself?”
“Oh, there’s enough!” laughed Evie. “You have such a strong character! I wish my mom had read me some of these stories. That would have messed me up even more!”
Bennett looked at Martin, noting his reticence. “Martin, we agreed a long time ago that if we think someone has written crap, we tell them we think it’s crap. If we’re confused, we say we’re confused. If we think it’s the best thing we’ve ever heard, well, actually, we never say that. But maybe it would help if Gwen caught you up on her character. Gwen?”
“Yeah, sure,” she nodded understandingly. “I write children’s stories, and my main guy here is Frank the Very Frank Chipmunk. His adventures always have a moral, and he’s pledged to always tell kids the truth. I created him because we really have a lack of honest, adult role models. I think he helps kids cut through all the b.s. in the world, so they can see what’s really going on.”
Martin nodded with muted condescension. “So, then, the voice?”
“Oh, that!” Gwen smiled proudly. “Well, I’ve imagined his world in ways that I can’t really put into a children’s book. Like the fact that he’s a heavy smoker, and that the cup of dandelion tea he has every night maybe has a little something in it. In the stories, his best friend is a gray squirrel, but we all know that there are some benefits being passed around. He lives in Ohio or somewhere Middle-America, but in my mind he’s straight out of the Bronx.
“I believe that if I flesh out his character in the larger world, then I can easily find the truths he needs to convey to children.” She looked at Martin with confidence and solicitation.
“Like moles are spies?” Martin asked a little incredulously. “What is the moral there?”
“Oh, that’s just for fun. I realize it might be a bit confusing, but stick around and you’ll get a sense of the overall ‘oeuf,’ as Evie might say.”
“’Oeuf? Isn’t that an egg?”
Evie leaned forward onto the table and gave Gwen a friendly sneer. “She’s referring to my poetry. I play with words a lot, and in the process certain juxtapositions occur. I’m not sure it’d be your thing, actually. But my hope is that people think of things in bigger ways, that they feel the intrinsic connection that encompasses seemingly disparate realities. So in this case, ‘oeuf’ is a stand-in for ‘oeuvre,’ which really says a lot about our work as artists, don’t you think? The homophonic characteristics create a sense of depth, while the nearly synonymous qualities expand our comprehension infinitely.”
“Oeuf and oeuvre are not exactly synonyms,” Martin replied.
Evie raised an eyebrow and looked Martin directly in the eyes. “Rooster vainly crows/Hen quietly sits a-nest/Oeuf her life’s oeuvre,” she said coolly. She sat back and crossed her arms, awaiting his rejoinder.
Martin stared at Evie a moment, then glanced around the circle at the suppressed grins. Gwen offered a supportive smile. “She swears via haiku, just warning you. You won’t be able to out-maneuver her. She’s formidable.”
Evie tapped an imaginary service bell on the table. “Ding! Next!” she added prosaically.
Anxiously, Bennett motioned towards the writer on Gwen’s left. “I think she means you, Stu! Whatcha got for us tonight?”
Stu sat up and tugged at his faded concert t-shirt. “Yeah, uh, sure. So Mart, just to give you a little heads up so you don’t have some kinda freak-out, I write fan fiction. There are a lot of universes out there, dude, so don’t get too hung up on any reality you might be unfamiliar with. You into fan fic at all?”
“Can’t say that I am,” Martin replied, patronizingly. “But I do appreciate your letting me know ahead of time. I promise I won’t…um…how to say this? I’ll give you a lot of leeway, let’s say.”
“Dude, don’t get all uppity! Rush fan-fic is serious stuff, just maybe not what you’re used to. Chill, man.”
Bennett held up a hand. “Hey, sorry to interrupt, but just read, Stu. Let’s all relax a bit. We seem a bit tense tonight, and that’s not really our thing. So, give us a little recap first, and then let your work speak for itself. I’m sure Martin will grok once you get started.”
“Yeah, sure thing, Bennett. So, if you guys remember, in the last chapter, Tom Sawyer had just been dragged before the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx.”
Scene 4
Bennett turned his room inside-out once again, but still there was no sign of his missing journal. He had cursed himself so much over the past ten days that he had no more words left. Why had he clung to such a quaint old habit, writing with a pen on paper? He had convinced himself that words flowed better that way, that they transmitted themselves through his body’s neurons into the atoms of the pen and its ink, implanting themselves into the grain of the paper, constant contact with each syllable, movement, and thought.
He felt like a character in his latest story: the password had been encoded on a chip, sewn into the hem of his climbing pants. All he had to do was complete the ascent—like he’d done in VR dozens of times—and walk past the cairn, lightly brushing his leg against the lowest protruding stone. An easy, unnoticeable action which would trigger transmission of leaked documents from clandestine meetings at COP 26. The following political explosion would forestall a literal one, and the western world would live another day. But losing his grip at the edge, he plunged backward over the precipice, never to be heard from again.
Why hadn’t he at least made a backup on the copy machine, after hours at work?
And speaking of work, he noticed he was now late for the fourth time this week.
Scene 5
Bennett had forgotten how heavy the restock cart could be. Why didn’t they put larger wheels on this thing? Some which could bully their way over the carpet rather than meekly wrestling against the industrial pile?
Consigned to restock duties for three days—due to his recent spate of tardiness—he grumbled through historical fiction and groaned over dictionaries. Why so many words?
Isn’t that the immortal question? Why so many words when only a few will do? He was guilty of over-prosing himself, that’s for certain. In the search for the perfect phrasing, or to deluge the reader with emotion, he had traded rhapsody for symphony. The Sumerians didn’t waste their time: they put stylus to tablet and got straight to the point. The Ten Commandments were the very model of efficiency and sufficient to hold an entire culture together. But now here he was struggling with words by the volume.
Looking up from the cart, he spotted Martin filtering between shelves. He was carrying a substantial stack of books.
“Oh, please buy those books, Mart. Don’t leave them in a reading area. Don’t leave them outside the restroom or in the coffee shop. Buy them or put them back yourself—Oh, hi, Martin, What’s up?”
“Hello, Bennett. Is someone ill today? I’ve never seen you relegated to the restock cart.”
“Yeah,” he lied. “You know how part-timers can be. Just take random days off, no-show all the time. Leave us committed working class heroes to pick up their load. By the way, that’s quite a haul there.”
“Mm-hmm. Research. I never feel like I know enough about what I’m writing. By the way, did you ever find your misplaced story?”
Bennett shook his head and gripped the cart. “No. And it’s driving me crazy. I keep thinking it’ll show up somewhere here, pushed out from under a café table when they finally sweep that place. Or maybe it fell behind a magazine rack or who knows. I just hope it turns up. I had such a head of steam on the story, too.”
“That is definitely tragic.” Martin casually picked a book off the cart. “I don’t want to keep you from your work, but do you mind if I quickly check what you have here? Might save you a bit of trouble.”
“Help yourself!” Bennett chuckled. He resumed shelving fiction, by author, last name beginning with M.
Martin shuffled through the non-fiction titles, flipping aimlessly through a few of them. He spotted the blank journals lower on the cart.
“Bennett, I don’t suppose you’re putting these back out, too?”
“Yes, except for the ones you’re buying!”
“I’ll relieve you of two at least. Now which ones?”
After carefully considering three or four, he selected two and placed the others back on the cart. He called a quick goodbye to Bennett, who was now working his way through the Rs.
An hour later, after providing breaks for folks at the counter, Bennett was left with only the blank journals. He had fended off restock from the customer service desk, the front counter, and the coffee shop. He was on the home stretch. No need to alphabetize blank books!
He grabbed a handful and began rapidly organizing by color, stripes, checks, sequins. Seriously, he thought to himself, why sequins? We love sparkly things, but did the presumptive artisan who made these ever try to shelve them?
His internal rant was sharply halted. Poking out of a journal—a brilliant red one like the one he’d lost—was a torn page. He immediately recognized the fragment of script which was showing, for it was his own. A torrent of emotions washed over him: anxiety, confusion, anger, and a bit of fear.
Hesitating for a tense moment, he opened the journal and pulled out the page. It had been torn, violently it seemed, from its binding. Heavily creased, it appeared to have been crumpled, then flattened out again. A scarlet serpent raged its way down the page, hissing disapproval. His heart racing, Bennett turned the page over. It had been used as printer paper.
He couldn’t help but read out loud: “’Does the pleasure of releasing an inhibited gust of malice make the effort, or the satisfaction, worth more than it costs?’ Ellen G., 1944.”
“What is this?”
Scene 6
Bennett sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. He stared at the screen.
“I have no idea what this is about.”
His internet query had landed him in an early 20th-century literary quarrel, between writers of some standing in Richmond, Virginia. Their friendship was fragile and questionable, their barbs occasional but intense, and the whole to-do filled with exceptional linguistic gymnastics. Was it some kind of game?
He bookmarked the most informative search result, putting it in a folder titled Glasgow Cabell. Perhaps more pages were to come.
If only sleep would do the same.
Scene 7
Evie gracefully but grudgingly navigated the wheezing of the espresso machine. She worked the rhythm of her latest poem around the clink of coffee cups.
Sun comes late
Stumbling blocks
Mountains
The search of therapeutic waters
Hovering pacifically
To think, perhaps
A bath, drawn cold
Trembling to test the waters, just the surface
To produce a work is not to simmer
Waiting but not hesitating
Diving on the horizon
She surveyed the faces around the table, gauging each person’s response. She noted confusion, appreciation, pretense, and disdain. She considered it another win.
Martin spoke first. “May I ask, what is your approach and purpose in writing poetry? I find your work utterly confusing and self-indulgent.”
“Yes, I can see that,” Evie replied, relishing the potential for manipulation which deciphering her work provided. “I realize you take things literally, you want to understand the facts. Well, there are no facts. There are feelings, there are impressions, there are misunderstandings. But actually knowing something, well, that’s not within reach. My poetry is designed to evoke your response, which I have just done. That’s it, Martin. I wanted a response, and I’ve gotten what I wanted.”
“But your words, your phrases are garbled, it seems. I really do wish to understand how you work and why. I mean, this is a writers’ group, is it not? Where we share our writing and discuss the process and meaning, to see if we’re coming across or missing the mark. So, please, a little assistance.”
Evie scornfully looked into Martin’s eyes. “Look, it’s not that big of a deal, but I can see you’re struggling. So I’ll take a cue from Gwen’s hero and be very frank: I write what I really feel. But what I really feel is none of your business. So I go through a series of translations to obscure the meaning and the emotion, and out come other meanings and emotions.”
“A series of translations?”
“Yes, I took this poem, for example, from English to Icelandic to Urdu to French, then back into English.”
“You speak Urdu?”
“No, of course not! I use online translators.”
Martin sat upright and opened his eyes wide. “You’re not being serious. You’re playing a game here. I thought this group … Instead, I’m sitting here with a bunch of children playing with a magnetic poetry kit. You’re getting a machine to write your poems.”
Evie glared and spoke directly at Martin. “Oh, look, we have a purist in our midst. Martin, have you ever heard of photography? It uses a machine—called a camera—to capture an image. The photographer, that’s what they call the person using a camera, points it at something, adjusts a knob or two, then clicks a button. The art is in the framing, referred to as composition.”
“Yes, don’t patronize me, Evie, I know about photography.”
“Oh, I’m not finished, Martin,” Evie said disdainfully. “After the photographer captures the image, she may take it through multiple manipulations, sometimes while it’s still in the camera, sometimes outside the camera. Each step of the way she’s using machines, computers, tools of some type. She may dodge and burn a little—you can look those terms up on your own time. But to keep a long story short, she uses machines, lots of them, and she learns to work with them.
“So, you might scorn my use of online translators, but you might also try to understand what I’m doing. I make word choices based on the power or inadequacy of the translator I choose. Words sometimes drop out; others are wildly mistranslated, especially after the third or fourth iteration. I accept all those mistakes, for I’ve solicited them. My use of these tools is like carving out a space in which unpredictability is a constant. I create unique statements. The art lies it letting them be. Do you object to that?”
Martin stared with his mouth partially open, as if he were trying to form vowel sounds. Stu stepped into the gap.
“It’s like Jimi Hendrix, man,” he offered sympathetically to both Evie and Martin. “His use of backward tape wasn’t just some gimmick. He composed with that in mind, creating solos so that they would sound a certain way in the final recording. He made crazy, wild masterpieces, not like any other guitarist.
“So, Martin, my man,” continued Stu, “Evie’s got her thorns, but she’s also got a point. It’s hard to define art, so just let it talk to you. Listen. Maybe her method blows your mind, or offends your formality, or just doesn’t speak your lingo. But just relax, dude. She’s no threat to your syntax. I will add that her poems are much better in the original Klingon, though.”
Martin looked around the group sheepishly. He felt awkward, on-the-spot, ridiculed, and agitated.
Bennett fidgeted nervously, aware that as his own anxiety had grown the past few weeks, so had that of the group in general. “Let’s all relax, folks,” he echoed Stu. “Kurt, you feel like sharing some of your memoir with us tonight? Why not give Martin a short recap first.”
“Sure,” Kurt nodded with an uneasy smile. “So Martin, my current project is a memoir of my time as roadie and chief lyricist for an Appalachian punk band, Black Lunge. I hope you enjoy it, but mostly, I want your feedback. That’s, uh, what we’re here for, you know?”
That night we played an underground club in Brooklyn. Hank was ill—his respiratory symptoms had sidelined him three nights so far on this East Coast tour. I went on as the singer, our typical arrangement when he’s down. Our fans have always loved it. It’s like I’m the secret weapon, and they come to the gigs wondering if there’ll be a sighting. We and they thrive on this chaos, this unpredictability. It’s real.
I enjoy it, but it’s a lark for me, not a passion. The band gets into it because of the thrill of change. Hank loves it too, for he gets to watch his favorite band from the side of the stage. He knows I’m no threat to his position.
We had chosen this show to debut our stinging cover of Canary in a Coal Mine. Long offended by the song which reduced our lives to a danceable simile, I relished the thought of throwing it back at the world as an anthem of hard truth and defiance. I had rewritten the verses, each one citing symptoms from diseases we had been immersed in all our lives: CWP and silicosis, COPD, emphysema, fibrosis.
We play it hard ska, and I sing it like Dwight Yoakam on meth, and we have to lower it a key or two to match my range. As I growled the lyrics into the mike, I watched the realization hit the crowd: they’re watching and hearing the actual canaries in the coal mines: the five of us, our fathers, brothers, uncles and friends, we’re the canaries every day, and while we don’t want to die, we also don’t flinch.
Gig over, we lugged our gear back into the van. I tightened the roof rack bolts again, hoping the rust would hold until we got back to Harlan. I double-padlocked the doors, and parked in the economy garage near our hotel.
Hank turned in for the night. Skeeter, Will, and Darrell suggested we take the subway to Times Square and do a little sightseeing. It’s a town that never sleeps, the old song goes, so I agreed to go with them. Standing there, in the Great White Way, the Crossroads of the World, in the middle of 33 square miles of 24/7 nonstop lights, awash in neon, incandescent, and fluorescent luminescence, my inner core retched and recoiled. This is where the fruits of our labor were devoured. This is why Grandpa Tommy died. The world celebrates while we cannot breathe. They drink wine and spirits while we have not one drop of potable water. They dance while we shake.
Resentment is a low and mean feeling, and I can’t describe all I felt in the midst of all that illumination. Maybe it was resentment, maybe it was just full-throated anger, intense, visceral, and motivating. I went back to my hotel room and began writing the songs that would become our next album, The Fires of New York.
We had the right to scream. We paid for it with our mountaintops.
Silence enshrouded the group. Sniffles slowly emerged, as did sympathetic sighs. Evie spoke first.
“Thank you, Kurt. I simply have no words. Your story, your wording, your imagery…you put me there in that place with you. You make me angry, sad, motivated. You move me to action.”
“That’s what I’m hoping for,” Kurt replied. “On a large scale.”
After Kurt, Gwen read more from Frank the Very Frank Chipmunk. As closing time drew near, Martin was the only writer yet to read.
“Martin, we have a few more minutes,” Bennett said, opening his hands invitingly. “How you feeling? Want to give us a little something, an excerpt that will help us get better acquainted with what you do? I’ve told them a lot about your writing and its qualities. So, have anything for us?”
Martin was hoping the clock would run out tonight, that with all the discussion about poetry and music and salacious tales from the road, there would be no time for him to read. He could offer a patented but insincere apology, shake hands, tell everyone what a great time he’d had, thank them for helping him understand their work, and then never come back again. But miraculously, there were fifteen minutes left till close.
“Well,” he began slowly. “I suppose I could read something.” He fumbled in his bag, delaying a few seconds, killing time. Feeling the stares of the group, he pulled out some crisp and newly-printed pages in a manilla folder. He laid the folder on the table, and carefully flipped it open. He lifted the first page. “This, yes, this.”
He took a sip of his water and gently cleared his throat. “This is still in progress, of course.”
Tristan marveled at how it fit his hand. The cold steel contours mirrored, as if in 3-D, the lines in his hands, projecting his lifeline into the great unknown. He appreciated the crisp, elegant, and precise engineering which could create such a masterpiece of economy and utility. He particularly admired the polished nickel plate, reflecting as it were his intentions. This machine always did what was asked of it. A simple movement of the hand—a finger, even—could release the lock or charge the barrel. It was made to open doors, he considered, and to close them decisively as well. Where opportunity might have been denied, it could create a new chance. It enabled passage through walls, and this thought caused him to hesitate, to ponder for a moment the fact that we build walls only to create an accompanying means of egress. In an instant, one’s whole life could change by using this simple machine.
It is one of the truly ambidextrous machines, he thought. He switched hands: there it was, that comfortable grip, the sense of empowerment, the absence of surcharge because he was left-handed. Because he was sinistro, a linguistic bias that expressed itself in surcharge after surcharge on normal every day goods. The social bias reflected in how things were designed: the circular saw, scissors, those abominable butter knives, the brace and bit, the weedeater. Clockwise means circling to the right; to go left is to be counter, against the majority, contrary, inconvenient, a problem.
Out of curiosity, he had traced the serial number to identify the foundry that had cast the steel. It was in New Zealand, which surprised him a little. He had expected it to be from Germany—there’s bias again, running in his notion that precision machine-making was solely a Bavarian trait. It had been assembled in the United States, another example of global trade and intricate multi-national cooperation. Having thoroughly researched globalization, he knew the current manifestation was just an extension of humans’ ancient desire to have something from somewhere else, to own a piece of the exotic. It had degraded from spices and caffeine and aromatics—things which can enhance one’s pleasure and develop the senses—to things as mundane as toothpicks and door knobs. Once it was the urge to indulge; now it was the urge to bypass labor law and evade scrutiny. To have explosive power. He glanced at the floor on which he was standing, the rich hue and patina of teak, felled in a forest before the worldwide ban, and he marveled at why someone in that forest would ever sell its wood to begin with. That first transaction led to displacement of other natural resources, to the exploitation of workers, to the manipulation of markets and the cultivation of desire among consumers. Colonization as a defining force and modeling medium: it was all there at his fingertips.
He was holding freedom or captivity in the palm of his hand: in the palm of his hand! Just think of it: though produced in mass quantities, this iteration still fit into his hand as if it were made solely for him to use. Such violence and trespass, mass-produced yet particular. He stood there a minute longer, maybe 10, maybe 20, considering the pros and cons of taking this step. There would be no undoing it. Then, with all the purpose within his soul, he wrapped his fingers comfortably but resolutely around the mighty cast metal, and engaged. It was like an epiphany: the sudden flash of light, the smell of newly mown grass, the dry rustle of newsprint.
Martin languorously dropped the page back into its folder. He paused slightly before looking around the dead-silent table.
Lance shifted in his seat. Kurt stared, wide-eyed, at the tabletop. Gwen continued her doodling, not bothering to disguise it.
Evie spoke first, in a sigh that betrayed relief. “I though he’d never pull the trigger.”
“Pull the trigger?” Martin asked, a little confused.
“Yeah, that’s a revolver he’s holding, isn’t it?”
“No, it is manifestly not a revolver,” Martin replied with chilly defiance. “It’s a door knob.”
“A door knob?” Stu snorted. “Seriously, dude, a door knob?”
“Yes,” Martin adjusted his posture, sitting more erectly. He seemed to be summoning his self-respect. “He’s going out to get the paper.”
Gwen stopped her doodling and looked at a distant discount sign. “Well, I will commend you on having no head-hopping. That’s refreshing.”
“Yep, definitely none of that!” Lance agreed. “Hey, Bennett, you still here? What do you think of Martin’s reading? He’s here for feedback.”
“Yeah, Martin, that was really something. But, my old friend, I have to go back to two words we’ve exchanged over the years: word count. You could reduce this by half and have greater impact. Just telling it like I see it. That being said, I’ll never look at a handgun the same way again. And look here, it’s closing time!”
His comments were followed by a flurry of journals being shoved into backpacks, the sound of scraping chairs, and hasty goodbyes.
Scene 8
The green banker’s lamp valiantly struggled against the moonless night. Its guided light shone downward, playing a shadow game across a scarred and creased piece of paper.
Next to the paper, nimble and agitated fingers provoked a keyboard. The mouse pointer stabbed its way through browser tabs, choosing, through elimination, the perfect expression of poisonous rivalry.
“This one,” he whispered to himself. He felt his scowl escape through a sinister sigh.
Grabbing the paper, he ran it back and forth over the edge of the desk, working out the most pernicious kink. Placing it in the feed tray of his antiquated printer, he victoriously clicked the print icon. The paper’s rugged terrain warped the words rather elegantly, he noticed.
Scene 9
“Oh, that’s a great read!” Bennett complimented a customer as he rang up her purchase. “I couldn’t put this one down. I finished it in one good weekend day. I think you’ll enjoy it!”
The transaction being completed, he moved to the restock shelf behind him. It looked so paltry compared to the cart! This would only take minutes to reshelve, then he could get back to closing duties.
He grabbed an armful of books and turned quickly towards the floor. The books scattered as his sneakers caught on the carpet.
“Damn!” he said perhaps a little too loudly. “This was supposed to be an easy one!”
He gathered the books into a stack, and that’s when he saw it. He felt himself shudder.
It was another blank journal with a scrap of page flapping out the top like a flag of surrender.
Bennett picked it up slowly and pulled out the page. It was another of his, from his lost journal. He noted that it was non-sequential with the previous page. Whoever was doing this had his entire journal and was feeding it back to him in random bites.
He turned the page to its backside. He’d only ever used the front side of a page. The back was reserved for edits, notes to self, plot development, and other writing direction. In the center, horizontally and vertically, of this crumpled paper landscape was another quote:
This is a load of rubbish, really. I take the mickey out of myself on the piano and play stuff like this. I think they know it’s not that good. — Ray D., 1967
“What the hell is going on here?” he said as he stared at the page, shaking in his hands. He stood, folded the page in fourths, and stuck it in his back pocket. He noted the time and date, in case that should prove important some day. With his mind circling and reeling, he restocked the small pile of books and left as quickly as his duties would allow.
Arriving home, Bennett practically ran for his computer. Entering the entire quote into his search bar, he was presented with numerous links to an album review from 1967, Disc and Music Echo Magazine,” Ray Davies Reviews the Beatles LP.”
“What does this have to do with me?” he wondered aloud.
Scene 10
The following Wednesday, the dedicated band of writers gathered in the coffee bar at Mille-feuille Books. Claiming their favorite chairs, they ordered coffee, took out journals and pens, and said their hellos.
“Hey, Bennett, how do you and Martin know each other?” Lance asked while stirring his cappuccino. “Y’all seem pretty familiar with each other’s style and focus.”
“Well, we met at a writers’ seminar maybe eight years ago,” Bennett replied. “We were sitting at the same table during a break between sessions. I was scarfing down a muffin as he was cramming in some research. I just asked what he was looking up so hard. The rest is history, as they say.
“I will add that he knows just about everything. Arcane stuff, like studio dates played by a session man in the 1960s, the dangers posed by space junk, how much Chinese tea was traded for a Tibetan war horse, on and on. I’d count on him to find the most salient point for any situation you can imagine.”
Evie shook her head and smirked slightly. “Research, okay, but art…I wonder. He has his particulars, as do I, but wouldn’t he be more at home at a tech writers’ meetup, or a MENSA convention?”
Bennett frowned and waved a hand. “Okay, take it easy, Evie. He’s struggling like the rest of us. He just does it more precisely, shall we say.”
As if on cue, Martin approached the table and placed his hand on the last open seat. “Hello, everyone. I hope you don’t mind my attending again tonight.”
“Such precise grammar,” Evie said as she removed the tea infuser from her cup and clanked it onto a saucer.
Gwen offered Martin a welcoming smile. “We were just talking about how you and Bennett know each other. So, what’s your side of the story?”
“I met Bennett at a writers’ conference, as I’m sure he mentioned. Setting that aside, I’ll say that I have never met anyone who can write with such alacrity—and quality—as he does. The words simply flow, coherently, artfully, compellingly…and it all seems to come with such ease. I’ll not diminish how hard he works at it. He just makes it seem easy. I’d be bitter and envious if I didn’t respect him so much.
“I guess it’s a writers’ bond, a connection that doesn’t really make sense or is easily explainable. We’re a bit like Mailer and Vidal: friends at the top and rivals down below.”
“Who?” asked Gwen.
“That is perhaps deeper than I’d go in public,” Bennett responded with a curious tone. “But hey, it’s time to start! Who wants to read first?”
“Why not you, Bennett?” suggested Kurt. “You haven’t read in a while. What’s the deal?”
Bennett shrugged with a helpless look on his face. “My journal is still at large. I’m trying to piece the story back together, one painful fragment at a time. So far, all I have is a shattered image of what I was working on, not to be too dramatic!” His attempt at upbeat ended on a downbeat, the tone of his voice betraying his projected calm.
“I know you’re not too happy about your missing journal, but you still speak in such a rich way. I can feel your pain, man,” offered Stu, consolingly. “So, maybe Evie goes first? What do you have for us tonight, poet extraordinaire?”
Evie smirked at Stu. “Such elegant praise, Stu. I don’t know how I’ll be able to manage it. But I’ll try. Here’s something I’m still trying to translate into its final form. I’m happy with it and yet, you know me, I’m not happy with it. Please hold your applause.
Windy night
Windy thoughts
What is the wind, if not the thought of a restless roar?
They all come to night to look for the attention of the abandoned on quiet evenings.
Like the wind, they don’t know
Unsatisfactory results:
Your only consolation
Is to interrupt your dream of riding on the tail of the wind
To pull another corner,
And wait for the next windy night.
The group held its silence for a moment or two, savoring Evie’s construction of meaningful phrases and dada expression. Kurt spoke first.
“’Interrupt your dream of riding on the tail of the wind’…’the thought of a restless roar’…Evie, that is magnificent! I wish I’d have come up with that back in the day. Don’t we all dream of being at the mercy of a powerful, natural force, holding on for dear life and yet, hoping we can just survive? I know I’ve felt that way. I want to know what your original line was, how you provoked such a translation, and then again, I don’t want to know, I just want to let it sink into me. Thanks for reading that.”
“And thank you,” she replied with sincere gratitude. “Your opinion really matters to me, Kurt. I think we have shared some experiences and mindspace along the way. Anyone else? What do you think?”
Through the next two hours, others read and offered their candid comments. Martin chose to go last again, measuring his luck on running out of time, diverting attention, and extending discussions of others’ work.
As the end of the meeting neared, he pulled out a stapled folio. He decided, upon scanning it quickly, not to read. Evie noted that it was printed in blue ink.
“Why the blue ink, Martin? Is that a preference of yours, or is your printer just a bit sad right now?”
He fumbled with the papers and flipped through them as if he wasn’t sure what was printed there. “My printer is out of black ink, that’s all. So rather than purchase a new black ink cartridge while the color one sits idle, I’ve decided to expend all its ink, too. I chose blue this time. I could have printed in magenta or yellow, but you know yellow is difficult to read.
“Some manufacturers use only two cartridges, black and a combined CYM. Others employ four cartridges, one black, one cyan, one yellow, and finally, one which is magenta. I do not have one of those printers. Which means, therefore, that I must either purchase a new cartridge in order to have the full spectrum—and therefore waste the other inks which might still be relatively full—or work my way through each color individually to drain the cartridge completely. I find waste abhorrent. I’ll print in yellow if I must.”
“Tell me, Martin,” Evie said, without a hint of sarcasm or guile. “Just what is your current work about?”
“I appreciate your interest,” Martin replied, with a touch of pride. “It’s an extrapolation of the Socratic method, the twenty questions exercises. I postulate that within your lifespan, there are only twenty things that you must know. You will learn these from twenty different people at random points in your life. Whether your interaction with someone is 20 seconds or 20 years, you might ask them only one question of import. You cannot predict the people or the individual cognitive artifacts. But once you learn the twentieth item, all of your life clicks into place and makes perfect sense. It’s a complex, living, multi-dimensional puzzle which suddenly appears when the final piece is in place.”
“Oh. Wow,” she replied, with a distant gaze and tone. “That’s actually pretty amazing. Do you consider it a work of fiction, or non-fiction? Like, is this autobiographical in some way?”
“It’s a hybrid, of course,” he answered matter-of-factly. “I am telling my personal experiences, but extending them beyond myself in an exercise in self-awareness, actualization, experience, and classical story-telling, one might say.”
“One might,” Evie nodded with raised eyebrows. “Who’s next?”
Scene 11
The week passed quickly, and soon the group found themselves together again. Each one had wished for just one more day to get their text perfected before sharing it with their friends. But Wednesday came on schedule, indifferent to their needs, as it had always done. After the routine greetings and settling in, Bennett spoke to the group.
“Hey, guys, I have to let you know that I believe my journal was stolen. I’ve been getting clues…random notes showing up that make me think I am being targeted. More on that later, but for now, just keep your eyes on your things and let’s not leave the table unattended. I should have followed this protocol from the beginning. Since I’m the group’s Mille-feuille sponsor, it’s all my responsibility. If we all need a break, I’ll stick around till one of you comes back. I’m just glad it wasn’t any of you who had something stolen.”
“Seriously?” asked Stu. “Who would steal a dude’s comp book? That’s just low-down mean.”
“Let’s not make a big deal of it yet. I hope to get it back somehow. I just need to figure out who has it and why. Like that’s an easy order!
“But in the meantime, I do have something to read!”
Seeing the excited faces around the table made Bennett happy. “Okay, this is really just a fragment, an exercise to keep me going. I was inspired by our meeting a couple of weeks ago. Let that stand without any explanation, and just enjoy the scene.
“So when does someone get it?” Bill asked. He strained to keep the impatience out of his voice.
“What do you mean, ‘get it’?” Ken responded, irritated that Bill would interrupt him as he read aloud his manuscript. The other writers abruptly and nervously studied the variations in the carpet pile.
“I mean, get it, like kapow! Right-in-the-kisser kind of stuff, or maybe a good overall thrashing. Where’s the hook, that’s what I’m asking. What makes me want to endure all your endless dialog? Give me some action, Ken! Get your characters off their soapboxes for a change, will ya? All they ever do is blah blah blah…”
Bennett paused for a moment, seeing that Martin had approached the table. “Have a seat, Martin. I’m just reading a small scene I wrote for fun. Let’s see, I was here, Bill was saying to Ken:
“Get your characters off their soapboxes for a change, will ya? All they ever do is blah blah blah…”
He was right. In all the time Bill had been attending the writers’ circle, all Ken had done was use his characters to spew his own philosophical arguments. It was even difficult tell if there was a plot sometimes. All the quotation marks stapling the story together left plenty of gaps for the plot to leak out.
“Bill, look, we’ve gone over this before. I don’t write that kind of stuff, you know that,” Ken offered almost apologetically.
Bill threw up his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, I’m tired of hearing what your characters think. I spend all my time wondering if they’re ever going to really do something.”
“So what do you want them to do, Bill? Come on, I can’t just have someone get blasted during the middle of a conversation…”
“Then can the conversation,” Bill offered rather plainly. “Please, just for once, let someone have it!”
“You say that like it’s easy to do. Then what happens to the point of my story, huh? It’ll change the whole thing. I don’t even have a violent character in the piece, so who’s going to ‘kapow’ whom?”
A few coughs around the circle suggested it was time to move on. Neither Ken nor Bill were ready to relinquish the argument, however. More than one of the listeners secretly wished Bill would just let Ken ‘have it,’ or vice versa. Can the conversation and do something.
“Then create a violent character,” Bill directed in frustration. “Or have a stray bullet come through the window, drop a safe off a ledge, something, anything, just cream someone for crying out loud! If you can’t figure it out, I’ll show you.”
Bill rose from his seat and took a step toward Ken.
“Oh, what are you going to do, come over and…”
Bill was already inches from Ken before he got the question out of his mouth. The other attendees watched and listened in amusement. Some swore they heard a distinct ‘kapow,’ while others testified to just a ‘pow.’ One described it as a ‘crunch,’ and still another as a simple ‘blam.’ They were unanimous, however, about Ken hitting the floor with a ‘thud.’
Laughter erupted around the table, but subsided quickly when it was clear that Martin wasn’t laughing.
Scene 12
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals,” he said to himself. “Oh, Edward, you are certainly vindicated tonight.”
He stood at the window watching the storm. Lightning played in the gaps between the upright, stiff, stodgy buildings of downtown. One force was energetic and fluid, the other rigid and unmovable. He knew where he stood in that contrast. He was as solid as a cornerstone.
“Now, what’s the appropriate message to convey at this moment? It’s been a fortnight, so maybe a strong statement is in order. Hmmmm….” He turned towards his desk and clicked on the lamp.
He chuckled as he sorted through the artifacts he’d collected. What comparison had he himself recently made?
“Oh, here it is. Yes, certainly, this.”
A few keystrokes and mouse-clicks engaged the printer. The paper, elegantly violated, distorted the words in the most amusing way.
He tucked the paper into his satchel, clicked off the lamp, and called it a good night.
Scene 13
Bennett had found this one in a nook, one of the many Mille-feuille provided for its customers. An overstuffed chair, a lamp, a small table, just how an avid reader might outfit a favorite corner in their reading room at home. All that was missing was a fireplace—and a complete journal. For there, tucked inside a Moleskine, was another single distressed page. Ripped edges, crumpled countenance, provocative editing, and a helpful hint printed on the back. A real cozy little nook, this one, he thought.
He had begun dreading the nightly sweeps through the store to find abandoned books. Anxiety gripped him any time he spotted a journal out of place. Sure, most of the time it was only that, a journal that someone decided against buying, and had just laid on the nearest shelf or table. But those times when the journal contained a page ripped from his own, now that’s when his heart raced and his breath became shallow.
He folded this one and put it into his pocket as he done the last one, knowing that reading it would make it impossible for him to focus on work.
Once home, he quickly shed his messenger bag, windbreaker, and sneakers. He sat down in front of his computer, pulled out the page, unfolded it, and read aloud.
“You see, punching is a species of inspiration, when all is said. So, I was warming up, and I wasn’t getting there. I had a heavy tumbler in my hand and it was filled with ice cubes and drink, and I threw the drink into his face and then bounced this heavy tumbler off his head. And that was what he thought was the punch. He spoke later, with his wonderful wit, of, ‘I saw this tiny fist coming at me.’ It was in fact an ice cube.”
“This just gets more strange,” Bennett shook his head. “I don’t know if someone is threatening me or trying to entertain me. I just want this to be over.”
He lay the page on his desk and sat silently for a few minutes. He resisted the urge to do an internet search. He could look it up in the morning.
Scene 14
In the morning, Bennett made his coffee and poured a bowl of granola. He flipped through the news on his phone as he ate, trying to ignore the page which taunted him from a few paces away. Finishing breakfast, he washed his dishes and dried his hands. Finally he made his way to the desk.
It was a bright morning, and light came in generously through the picture window behind his computer. It gracefully illuminated the worn and weary page, playing light against shadow as it crossed the creases. Then he saw it.
“This is blue ink.”
Scene 15
“Any of you guys know who Ray Davies is?” Bennett asked the group as they got settled in for the week’s meeting. “Gwen, what about you?”
“Nope, never heard of him,” she replied as she raised her latte for a drink.
“Evie, what about you?”
“The name sounds familiar, but I can’t think of anything I actually know about him. Who is he?”
“Stu?”
“Yeah, man, of course!” Stu said enthusiastically. “Great songwriter, great social critic, even greater cranky old man.” He looked at the younger members of the group. “Gwen, Evie, you guys and Lance may not know much of the Kinks’ music, but he was their frontman and chief songwriter. Far more than you’d know by You Really Got Me, literate kind of guy. Just ask Kurt when he gets back. Why do you ask, Bennett?”
“I came across a curious item the other day,” he began explaining just as Martin walked up and took a seat. “Martin, you know Ray Davies, right?”
“Well, I certainly know of him. Brilliant man, somewhat skewed in his view of the world, and perhaps bitter in his outlook. He’s very competitive, perhaps more than a little tormented, and positively beastly towards his brother. Why the question, Bennett?”
“I was just about to share this thing I read a few days ago,” Bennett said as he raised up a page printed from the internet. “Back in 1967, he wrote a review of the Beatles’ Revolver album. He wasn’t too impressed, apparently.”
“Not impressed by the Beatles?” asked Evie. “I like this guy already. Off the main stream.”
“Yes, that’s for sure,” agreed Stu. “But what did he say, Bennett? I’m sure he had some choice tidbits, man.” He waved at Kurt, returning from the coffee bar. “Hey, Kurt, we’re talkin’ Ray Davies.”
Bennett continued. “Yes, to good tidbits. Here’s one: ‘It sounds like a cross between the Who and Batman.’ That was his opinion of Taxman. Here’s another: ‘it sounds like they’re out to please music teachers in primary schools.’ Any guesses on the song?”
“No idea, here,” replied Stu, glancing at Kurt.
Kurt paused a moment as if going through the record’s track listing. “I don’t know, Good Day Sunshine?”
Martin set down his tea and raised his hand. Bennett nodded at him. “Eleanor Rigby, I’d guess.”
“Correct, Martin! Here’s just one more, then we can get on with our meeting. ‘I can imagine they had George Martin tied to a totem pole when they did this.’ Anyone?”
Martin cleared his throat. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” he said dryly.
Bennett smiled. “Correct again, Martin! You win this round of why-are-we-doing-this!”
“So, not to ask the obvious, but, hey, Bennett, why are we doing this?” asked Stu. “Is this your contribution tonight, an old album review by one of the greatest rockers ever? I mean, Davies is cool but he’s not exactly writing stories like you do.”
“Thanks for the compliment, Stu! Well, I came across it and it made me wonder about rivalries and animosities that rise between artists. Why do they waste their time on torpedoing each other? There’s a lot of room out there for what each of us is doing, and we don’t need to be making it rougher on each other.”
“Is this somehow about your missing journal?” asked Kurt. “You think someone took it out of jealousy? Do you have a single enemy in this world? You’re about the menschiest mensch I’ve ever met.”
“Well, I don’t know,” replied Bennett, his eyebrows arched highly. “I just wonder. I saw today that The Monkeypaw Journal was accepting submissions for their annual anthology. They have a ‘message in a bottle’ theme for next year, and since my story concerns an urgent missive on a microchip, it seems like a fit. But there’s no way I’ll make their deadline now!”
Gwen nodded and asked, “Didn’t they feature you in a short story special? They called you something like ‘most promising newcomer?’”
“Yeah, that was embarrassing,” Bennett replied demurely. “Martin, didn’t you submit a piece to them as well?”
“Yes,” Martin answered dourly.
“Well, how did it go?” Bennett followed up.
“Rejection, that’s how,” Martin said, with a curt clip in his voice.
Bennett frowned sympathetically. “I’m sorry to hear that. Rejection is tough. Remind me what the piece was about?”
Martin sighed impatiently. “It was an exposition of the sonata form and its relation to modern-day pop musical structure. Their rejection has prompted me to reassess their intelligence and aesthetic values. Be that as it may, let’s get back to matters at hand.” He looked at Bennett with a sardonic grin. “My friend, you are getting a glimpse of why I enjoy research so much.”
Bennett cocked his head and pursed his lips. “And why is that, Martin?”
“I don’t know what caused you to look into Mr. Davies’ opinion of the Beatles, but just think of what you’ve discovered. Adoration of their work wasn’t universal, but you’d not know that now that they’ve been enshrined as the greatest pop music group in modern history. Perhaps this will lead you to research other contemporary critiques. You’ve also learned that one great artist might be jealous of the accolades received by another, or envious of the relative ease with which they create their work. It can be difficult to balance one’s brilliance on one hand and one’s spite on the other. And of course, you see that artists can not always be believed or trusted.”
Bennett tossed the paper down onto the table. “Yeah, it’s fun knowing so many facts, Martin,” he said sarcastically. “Most of which I’d consider useless.”
“Facts are never useless,” Martin pushed back.
Bennett waved his hand to brush aside Martin’s opinion. “As for jealousies, the type that’d cause someone to attack another artist, any of you guys ever experienced this yourselves?” Bennett scanned the table. Several members shifted in their seats or shuffled their papers designedly. He continued.
“Orwell claimed that he wrote out of plain ol’ egotism. Richler claims writers have a huge appetite for revenge against even imaginary slights. Bourjaily—he was a playwright, columnist, instructor—said that feuding is what writers do to avoid writing.”
Evie rolled her eyes at Bennett. “Speaking of avoidance…are we going to read tonight, Bennett?” she asked, with an antsy edge to her voice.
Bennett ignored her question and persisted. “Then there’s Norman Mailer, man, he hated just about every one of his peers. He really had it out for Gore Vidal. He’d beat him up at parties and stuff. Vidal once talked about seeing a tiny fist coming at him—he was obviously mocking Mailer’s stature. Mailer, for his part, said it wasn’t his fist, but an ice cube from his drink. I mean, this is crazy stuff!”
He noted that no one in the group was listening but Martin, so he focused on him alone.
“Martin, no doubt you know about this? About Mailer and his outbursts? I think you mentioned it a few weeks ago, right here. You know, writers taking the mickey out of each other?”
“Yellow Submarine,” Martin answered as he set down his tea. “Now, shall we indulge in some good poetry? What have you translated for us tonight, Evie?”
Scene 16
He paced the room in agitation, twisting his hands anxiously. Pausing at the window, he looked at the midnight streets a few stories down. It was a quiet night, except for in his mind.
“It’s time to bring this story to a close,” he whispered.
It had become a ritual: smooth a journal page over the edge of the desk, place it, almost reverently, into the printer feed tray, click on ‘print,’ retrieve the paper, delight in the effects of the crinkles and creases. But he wasn’t feeling delight this night. Somehow, it had gotten deeper into him, venomously feeding every cell of his body.
“Where’s Alcott?” he asked the computer.
He navigated to the files he’d been curating the past several weeks and sorted them alphabetically. Opening a folder titled “Alcott, L. M.,” he double-clicked on “The Rival Prima Donnas.”
“Let’s see if he can find this one,” he laughed mockingly, as he printed the final scene on the back of a journal page. He admitted to himself that he did feel a shimmer of delight, reading the twisted text of an actress who kills her rival with an iron bludgeon. Even the planned stage production was derailed by rivalry: the leading actresses quarreled about who would kill whom.
“But why stop now?” he asked himself as he looked up from the paper back into the night. Possessed by his own obsession, he snatched the journal and its loose pages from his desk drawer, ran them across the desk’s edge one by one, shoved them all into the feed tray, and lost himself in a flurry of files, clicks, and printer icons. He was thankful for the new black cartridge.
He was not thankful, however, that he must wait until tomorrow to return Bennett’s much-adored journal.
Scene 17
He waited for the “we’ll be closing in five minutes” announcement. He smiled when he heard it, in Bennett’s voice. He tiptoed quietly through Travel, Ecojustice, and Cooking. He glided through Music and Performing Arts, and slipped into the restroom.
He’d observed the closing routine dozens of times, taking notes on timing, routes, and other patterns. He knew that in nine minutes he could swiftly but easily move into the stockroom. There, he could leave the finished journal—in pieces, of course.
As he waited in the restroom, he thought about how his comments would hit their mark. How each example from the larger artistic world would resonate with Bennett, would put him into his place, diminish his inflated certainty of himself.
“He’s really far too proud of his ability,” he said to himself. “Way too confident—just look at how quickly he writes! You can’t be a craftsman while in a rush. Way too impulsive. That whole ‘beauty will be convulsive’ idea…how repugnant.”
Once in the stockroom, he surveyed his options. He could leave the whole lot upon the worktable in the center of the room. Just lay the journal and its disgorged contents right by the dictionary. That would be ironic, would it not? To show an egotistical minimalist that words really do matter?
Or he could scatter them throughout the room. Strategically insert them into books in a pattern, yes, to categorize them into a larger and devastating puzzle. But that would take time that he didn’t have. He hadn’t the opportunity to stake out the stockroom and map out its methods and manners.
He had to go on intuition, which, he admitted, was not his strongest suit. Let’s see, he thought, where might he look first?
Then he heard him coming. He crouched behind a book cart.
Bennett entered the room and called out: “Hello? Anyone in here? I heard some movement, so if you’re in here, just identify yourself. No questions asked, no reports filed.”
Martin kept his quiet. He needed time to make a plan. He needed Bennett to leave the stockroom for at least a few minutes. He shifted on his feet, unaccustomed to holding a crouched position. He lost his balance and dropped the journal on the floor. He knew he had to identify himself now.
He raised from his crouch. Only the worktable stood between them.
“I came to give you back your journal,” he said tersely. He held the stressed binding, bulging with ripped pages, aloft in Bennett’s direction. “It’s been a singular pleasure to have read your work before anyone else. Thank you for the honor, but I am quite done with it. I hope you don’t mind that I’ve added a few critical remarks and citations throughout. Maybe you’d like to hear a line or two?”
Martin opened the journal and thumbed the pages as though it were a kineograph. He pulled out a page. “Yes, this is a good one: ‘The only thing you done was yesterday/And since you’re gone you’re just another day.’”
Bennett winced and took a step towards Martin. “I know that one—it’s John Lennon in How Do You Sleep, a song aimed at his old friend and rival, Paul. Why are you doing this?”
Martin scooted back a few feet, waving the journal in the air. “Let me just select another one, at random. Oh, this is rich: ‘Not only does this process of authorial colonization assert Jonson’s preeminence over a wide range of potential or actual literary rivals; it also aims to make those rivals virtually unreadable except in the terms imposed upon their work by Jonson himself.’”
He looked up at Bennett, watching for a reaction. Bennett appeared confused and weary. “Maybe one of your fawning sycophants can look that one up for you. It’s quite, shall we say, esoteric and arcane?”
Bennett had had enough. “Seriously, Martin, just give it all to me now. You’ve done enough damage, you’ve made your point. You’re clearly not yourself right now. We’ve been friends a long time, and I’d like to keep it that way. But really, you need to stop this harassment. And you need to get out of the store before I have to call security. It won’t be pretty if they come in here.”
“Oh, a threat!” Martin grinned with madness in his eyes. “Let’s take a moment to hear another literary luminary assess your talent.” He ran his index finger along the fanned pages and selected one. “Okay, this one is exquisite. Do listen carefully—it has a lot of words:
‘A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A STEWPID LITTEL BOY WHO TRIES UNSUCCESSFULLY TO HIDE THE VACUITY AND TRITENESS AND SHEER ANALITY OF HIS IDEAS BY A TECKNEEK COPIED FROM OTHERS AND BADLY COPIED FROM BAD OTHERS. A promising young writer. A promising young writer. A SILLY DROOLING YOUNG SPERMICIDE. (‘Eh?’) A SILLY DROOLING YOUNG SPERMICIDE. (‘Oh.’)’
“I do wish you could see it. I’ve taken it directly from the author’s text, and it is full of purposeful misspellings and excessive capitalization. But hazard a guess. Who said that, about whom, and when?”
Bennett stared at Martin and struggled to keep his anger from showing. “Martin, look, this is enough,” he said as he lunged around the corner of the worktable. “Just give me my journal—and get some help.”
Martin eluded him swiftly with a condescending smirk. “Nuh-uh, not so quick, Bennett. That was Kingsley Amis, writing about Alan Ross in 1946.
“You say that I need help. Like an editor, is that the implication? You and your relentless mantra of word count, word count, word count. Do you realize how many words are in the English language? It should interest you to know that I also write fluently in Latin, German, and Spanish. Do you know how many words that is? Oh, look, here on the table is a dictionary: The Oxford Complete Dictionary of the English Language in One Volume. Do you want to count the words? Now tell me, am I using too many?”
Bennett was well beyond anger, firmly into exasperation and throttled rage. “Martin, really, calm down. Use all the words you want. I just believe in the force of few words, that’s all. We’ve gone through this a hundred times. You elaborate, while I am a minimalist.”
“You’re a patronizing ass, that’s what you are, Bennett!” Martin flung Bennett’s journal across the table, sending pages flying chaotically around the room. “All your patronizing advice! Do you know what patronizing means? How about bumptious? Ever heard of that word? Here, look it up!”
Martin leapt up onto the worktable and grabbed the dictionary. He lifted but the book did not follow. “Damn, did they leave some of the printing plates in this edition?”
Bennett waved his arms and leaned against the table. “That’s not what you think it is, Martin! Don’t try to pick it up!”
“Again, that peremptory attitude! I know a dictionary when I see one!” Martin squatted over the book and gripped it tightly. With an audible grunt, he raised the book and heaved it above his head.
The room was filled with sound: of Martin falling to the floor; of coins breaking out of their paper tubes and scattering into every corner; of the book safe tumbling off the table, of Bennett’s exclamations of warning and expressions of compassion for his troubled assailant.
Scene 18
The paramedics arrived punctually and carted the unconscious Martin to an ambulance. Bennett never broke stride as he swept coins out of every nook and cranny. Sweeping was very calming. Reach with the broom, pull the broom back, gather coins into a bucket. Repeat.
A police detective approached him. “So, I understand you’ve known him for some time. What was your relationship to him?”
Bennett paused in his movements and looked at the detective. “Writers, we’re both writers. We met at a conference. He is brilliant, but he is also quite wordy! I was always telling him to reduce his word count, to cut it by half or more. So when he grabbed the book safe with the change order, I thought ‘now we’re getting somewhere.’ It has half the words he thinks it has. I always told him, never underestimate the force of fewer words. Reduce your word count and you’ll be deadly.
“He acted as if using fewer words would kill him. It very nearly did. “