“Uh-oh,” she said.
“I know, right?” he said. “You kept dying,” he said. “Drowning, dying. It was really upsetting.”
“Yikes,” Brenda said.
“But inside of one of the dreams, I woke up and realized I’d only been dreaming, though. I realized you weren’t dead, that you hadn’t drowned, that everything was fine. That one was a really happy one—I mean it made me so happy. Brenda: alive! But then I realized that that was a dream, and—”
“Dude,” Brenda said. “You’re weirding me out, dude.” And then she scratched her knee and adjusted her tights, then coughed in her hand and tilted her chin and smiled and squinted her eyes, the fucking cocktease.
* * *
If Fondajane noticed the thematic correspondences—I certainly didn’t; not til just now—between that old story and the scene that the two of us were playing in the turret, she didn’t belabor them. To my “Thank you” she responded with nothing more or less telling than a smile, and transitioned us away from “Certain Something” in a word. “Anyway,” she said. “On my thousandth-some trip to the M’s shelf at Borders, I found No Please Don’t. I hadn’t yet seen a single review, and hadn’t a clue that it existed until it was in front of me. I was so excited, Belt, so thrilled to finally have a novel by you that—well, suffice it to say that I read it in a sitting. Probably it would have been more suited to two sittings—the times I’ve gone back to it, I’ve read it in two—but it happened that the evening I came across it at the bookstore, I had to fly to Holland, for some conference in Den Hague on human rights, and I read it on the plane. I just wasn’t able to put it down. And really, I mean: I had a panel to sit on. I needed to sleep. I should have put it down. Instead I finished the book, finished it just as we approached our arrival gate. The ride to Den Hague from Schiphol was useless—I can’t sleep in cars—so when I got to the panel, I was so exhausted, I completely bombed. I was terribly inarticulate. Downright irritable with sleep deprivation. I may even, at a couple points—no, I’m sure of it—at a couple points, I cursed. I used the word ‘shit’ and I used the word ‘jerkoffs,’ words that, apart from being—how should I put it?—venue inappropriate—have never been in my public persona’s lexicon. I mean, ‘shit’—that’s one thing. But ‘jerkoffs’? Yikes.
“At the after-panel cocktail, I stood in a corner til a very nice, older gentleman approached me, a man called Bacon, and Bacon said kind, however surely untrue things about how much he enjoyed my performance as a panelist. Because, I suppose, I was so very disappointed in myself about my performance, I clung to Bacon for the rest of the evening, telling him, at some point, about your novel, that its brilliance and insights had kept me from sleeping. Long made short, it turned out Bacon was a publisher in Amsterdam, so I gave him your book—I had it in my purse. He sent me a letter just a few weeks later, and told me he’d made an offer on it. He also made a proposal that seemed a little—well, let’s say other than professional—and Bacon was charming, so I had to cut him off. I mean, maybe in another life, this Bacon and I, but in this life I’d already married Jonboat, and…I’ve always wondered if he ended up publishing the book.”
“He might have,” I said. “This was Sobchak—his publishing house? Bacon’s, I mean?”
“I think that was it.”
I said, “They definitely paid me, but I never saw the book. I don’t know if it ever came out. I should thank you, though, Fon—I’m…”
“Nonsense,” she said.
“No, I mean, I don’t think you understand. No Please Don’t—until last night, no one ever—I mean, except for my father and my editor—I never met—never even ever heard from a fan of the book.”
“I find that so hard to believe,” Fondajane said. “Obviously it’s not bestseller material, but…I’d have figured you’d have at least a fairly large cult following.”
“This is all very strange,” I said.
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“There’s a whole nother half?”
“Don’t you get cute with me, Belt Magnet.”
“Cute?” I said.
From the entrance to the stairwell came a xylophonic dinging. Two happy notes. Fondajane, sotto voce, said, “Not in front of Trip,” removed a Quill from my pack, and straightened her posture. I lipped my own Quill and lit us both up. We took a drag or two in silence, watching the stairwell. Then she said, “Trip?” and then she said, “Jonboat?” and, receiving no response, she got up from the hibachi (I averted my eyes), disappeared down the stairwell, and returned a moment later, saying, “That was odd. You heard the elevator dinging, right?”
“I think so,” I said.
“It’s just waiting there,” she said. “No one’s inside. Must be a malfunction. I’ll have to tell maintenance.”
From under the counter she pulled the stool adjacent to the one on which she’d previously been sitting—the stool two away from the one on which I sat—and from the seat of that stool she removed a steno pad, and from the pad’s spiral spine a pen. She wrote ELVTR along the back of her thumb—the pen was felt-tipped—and then, to both my relief and disappointment (I hadn’t been comfortable, I’d started getting comfortable), she sat on the stool from which she’d taken the notebook, i.e. such that now there was a stool between us.
“Where were we?” she said.
I said, “You told me about Bacon, and implied that there was maybe more to the story. Then you accused me of acting cute.”
“Right,” Fondajane said. She reached across the counter, as if to touch my hand, but didn’t quite get there. “Right,” she said again. “I was teasing you a little. But no, that was the end of the Bacon story. I was going to get back to the original story—how I introduced Trip to No Please Don’t. It was a couple of years ago—three? let’s call it three, I’m pretty sure it was three. We were at our home in Manhattan, and I wanted to read No Please Don’t again, and though I’d bought a second copy of it as soon as I came back from Europe, it seems it must have been in a box of books the Archons had lost a few months before, when I retired from teaching. You see, they’d moved my office library to the house, and—”
“The Archons?” I said.
“Burroughs and his sons,” she said.
“That’s what you call them?”