“I’m not sure,” Fon said.
“Well it didn’t make you cry, though, so maybe, you know, put yourself in my shoes—in me and Belt’s shoes—and try to think about what might—”
“I think Belt was trying to say he knew her, so seeing her—”
“Well but obviously he knew her—they’re in the video together. And I’m sure that knowing her made seeing her move him, also. But I think mostly he was moved because of what I just explained. The thing that moved me. I think the same thing moved both of us. This empathy thing I was saying. And empathy—man, that’s the big one, empathy. In art, I mean. It’s how you know you see the artist’s truth through his eyes—by feeling it, right? Empathy I’m saying. If you’re gonna inspire with a work of art, that’s the first thing you need to make happen: empathy.”
He went on for a while, about empathy and art and truth and inspiration, and I nodded indulgently, tuning him out, in part because it seemed like most of what he’d say would be a rehash of thoughts he’d already related to us in the turret, but in larger part because my boxer shorts, like some clammy python, had, earlier—at some point between my bolting from the zero-gravity chair and my return to the screening room—bunched and climbed within my jeans, twisting me up, pinching, abrading, even stinging a little, and, for whatever unliterary psycho- and/or physiological reason, my awareness of my physical discomfort had radically sharpened right around the time Trip had first mentioned empathy, in response to which sharpening I’d since been trying, with increasing focus, to handlessly disentangle myself by way of subtly shifting my weight, and flexing and relaxing lap-zone muscles I wasn’t used to deliberately engaging.
Eventually, I got there. Elastic slipped down, cotton crept sideways, and that which had been too high and to the left dropped rightward into its rightful place. Inseams decoupled and pressures relented. Heat abated. Tautened hairs slackened. I might have even moaned, the relief was so thorough.
“…that it should make people wish they could have been at the viewing to see it,” Trip was saying, as I tuned back in, “but not wish it so much that they resent the people who were there: it should inspire readers the same way A Fistful itself inspires viewers. But the trouble is my transcriptions suck. I tried my hand at the first twenty minutes or so, just to see what I could do, and…man. No good. At first, I thought the problem was the format, cause I did it like a screenplay, which was dumb to begin with—it’s just not as fun to read screenplays as prose, plus I think you lose the sense of there being an author in that format, which is the opposite of what I want, obviously—but then, even after I figured that out and did a second draft in more conventional prose, it still wasn’t working. Dead on the page. I couldn’t choose the right details to describe, you know? They all seemed important. Or, I don’t know: maybe I chose the right details, but described them too extensively. Especially the physical details about the Curios. Like that first Popsicles clip? I spent paragraphs describing the faces Scatty made. I wanted the reader to be as excited by picturing those faces as I get looking at them. But I guess I must get too excited looking at them, because when I read those paragraphs about them a couple days later, I was really…bored. And that’s just one example. What I’m trying to say is: I was too close to the material. That was the real problem. It’s still the problem. And I don’t see myself getting much distance anytime too soon, so—can you see where I’m going with this?”
He was looking right at me, grinning expectantly.
“Maybe?” I said, trying to mirror the grin, and not seeing at all—neither where he was going, nor from where he was coming.
“You obviously understand A Fistful of Fists,” Trip said. “You really get it. I mean, it couldn’t have moved you so much if you didn’t. But you didn’t make it, so you aren’t too close to it. And what I’m thinking is: you, my favorite writer—you should write the catalog copy.”
“The catalog copy…”
“Or yeah, no—you’re probably right. Maybe it’s better to just call it a transcript, cause it’s not like I want to put any stills from the collage in it. And I wouldn’t want you to write essays or commentary or anything, just descriptions of the clips. But then that’s more, strictly speaking, than transcription, though, right? I mean, I don’t want it to be all bare-bones. I want that Magnet prose. So maybe catalog’s better after all, or just even…book. It doesn’t have to be decided right now. Anyway, whatever we call it, I’d pay you a hundred thousand dollars to write it. Fifty out front, and then another fifty again when you deliver. What do you say?”
I turned to Fon for a reality check. She was smiling and, apparently, she misread my look as a plea. “I think you’re putting Belt on the spot,” she told Trip.
“I don’t mean to do that, Belt. Not at all. Take a couple days to think it over, if you want. A week, even. Maybe not too much more than that, though. I’d really like to get this thing settled. One thing watching the collage with you has shown me is that it’s pretty much there. Finished, I mean. I saw a few dull seconds in the Chameleon clip I should probably shave, and I want to noise-reduce the sound on about half the ones I transferred from analog, and possibly, I’ll swap the positions of the Maya and the Woof ones—I gotta think about that—but it’s looking like twenty, thirty more hours of work at most, so I’m thinking I want to host the viewing pretty soon. Not too soon, but over spring-break, probably, and the catalog—transcript, whatever—should probably take you six months to finish at most I’m thinking, and then I’ve got to get however-many hundreds of copies of it printed, which, I don’t know how much time that takes, but probably at least a couple weeks, I’m guessing, so if I have to find someone else to write it, then…Anyway, I really hope you’ll say yes, but no rush, okay? Take your time.”
I took my time, which was not a lot of time. One hundred thousand dollars—what was there to think about? True, I didn’t quite understand what I was being asked to write, or why, but I understood enough to know it wasn’t criminal or life-endangering, plus I was pretty sure that both the what and the why had been explained to me while I’d been attending to my balls, and that to indicate that—i.e. that I’d been attending to my balls instead of to the boy who’d just offered me a hundred thousand dollars, or that I’d been attending to anything, really, other than the boy who’d just offered me a hundred thousand dollars—would not be advisable.
One hundred thousand dollars.
The most I’d ever had was twenty-two hundred. (And that had owed to an error, plus the money had only kind-of been mine: a couple years earlier, the Social Security Administration had mistakenly mailed my father two biweekly SSDI checks for me in one biweekly period; the following period, having realized their mistake, they’d sent a notice explaining the mistake, along with a check for $0.00, which, for a while, Clyde had made a number of scenes trying “to cash” at various banks and currency exchanges. He’d had a lot of fun with that.) And sure as I was that, were Clyde in the screening room, he’d try to negotiate with Trip for more money, I was equally sure he’d be as thrilled as I to learn that anyone—didn’t matter who—wanted to pay me a hundred thousand dollars for my writing.