But then the next morning, I had trouble again. The second dry spell began. The words wouldn’t come, or they’d come out off-key. And then the same thing the following three or four mornings.
I had my outline, so it wasn’t that I didn’t know what to write about—next would come the description of the present-day compound, of the Archon sons and Hangstrong and Ulysses, of meeting Fon in the turret, and so forth—but more that I didn’t understand how to write about it. I didn’t understand why I’d ever thought the events I’d chosen to cover in the memoir could or should fit together to form a coherent, or even cohesive narrative. I was no longer able to hear the matrix*2. And whereas during the previous dry spell, all I’d had to do was read through what I’d already written to regain my traction, when I tried the same trick to break this second dry spell, it only made matters worse. I don’t know how to explain it without sounding even more precious and navel-gazy than I assume I already do, but: I’d somehow fallen out of sympathy with my memoir-self. With the exception of a couple moments in “The Hope of Rusting Swingsets,” I no longer related to the Belt I’d written five hundred–some pages about; I no longer related to the Belt I’d written five hundred–some pages as. I no longer cared to write a book about him, I certainly didn’t care to read one about him, and, above all, I doubted I’d care to read such a book if I were…you. Whoever you might be.
Then, five or six days into this second dry spell, Clyde was injured, and I was, uncomfortably, somewhat grateful to have a reason to take a couple days off and hang out with him at the hospital, playing Hearts and chewing Nicorette. Then he came home, and I spent a few more days running errands for him, lighting his smokes, and driving him to rehab, after which he, far more indirectly than I would have imagined (he said something mealymouthed about how it troubled him to think that the nurse’s aide the plant was paying for was sitting idle in our kitchen all day long), let me know that he needed more space.
Space for him meant time for me, and, as I’ve mentioned, it was nasty outside. Walks weren’t an option. Driving on ice required its own kind of all-consuming concentration. Reading old favorites didn’t lead to new insights. Eating didn’t take long, even overeating didn’t, and sleeping—I could do only so much of it.
I tried other things.
I bought bottles of Scotch in the hundred-dollar range, the fifty-dollar range, drank them, enjoyed them, couldn’t write, was sad.
I bought and read a few recently well-reviewed memoirs to bolster my spirits around the general pursuit of memoir-writing. They all told the same story: the author overcame adversity with virtue. As a reader, you’d either 1) spent your life being complicit in the systemic injustice that had caused the adversity, but now that you’d read the book, you’d been awakened to the role you played and were thus made virtuous (perhaps even brave), or 2) you’d spent your life being a victim of the same systemic injustice as the author while being equally virtuous, but it wasn’t until you read the memoir that you were able to realize just how virtuous you’d always been, just how much adversity you’d already overcome. Congratulations, either way!
I failed to see the appeal, remained unbolstered, missed fiction, was sad.
So then I tried reading a few recently well-reviewed novels, hoping to bolster my spirits around the more general pursuit of prose-writing. These novels were either 1) “autofictions” in which the narrators came to realizations about their complicity in the systemic injustice that caused the adversity of people like the authors of the memoirs described above, and mocked or “satirized” their pre-realization selves (bravely), 2) postapocalyptic dystopic fictions of the sort Stevie’s husband wrote, or 3) “global” novels, most of which hadn’t been written in English, and the best of which were satisfying for how they consistently undermined every philosophical and political point the cheerleading reviewers who’d recommended them claimed they demonstrated, but none of which (except for one, kind of) involved me the way the novels I’d always loved had.
So no help from Letters whatsoever.
Was this writer’s block? Was there really such a thing? I didn’t think so. Or rather, I didn’t think writers who said they suffered from writer’s block were saying anything other than “I have been unable to engage with literature for a reason or reasons that I cannot pin down.” What people referred to as writer’s block, I thought (and I’d always thought this, though I hadn’t ever suffered a dry spell prior to Blank’s death), was a symptom of something else. If somebody who happened to be a two-hundred-meter breaststroke gold medalist were to suddenly become paralyzed below the neck, you could say they were suffering swimmer’s block, but…
Did I want another cure? Is that what it was? No. I didn’t want another cure. And I didn’t believe—and I still don’t believe—that it was possible to want a thing without knowing you wanted it. You could need a thing without knowing it, though. Perhaps, I thought, I needed a cure, despite not wanting one. Perhaps, I thought, I didn’t know what was best for me.
So I hatched the cure from the marble that Blank had made the shell of. There was nothing Blank about it, at least according to its looks. According to its looks, it was only a clone of the cure Triple-J had tortured on the slide. I found the cure cute, liked it fine, taught it “Hi,” and we played some Make This Face, but I didn’t have much feeling for the thing—I guess I didn’t really try to. I didn’t even name it. When it was three days old, I decided to get rid of it before it could finish imprinting on me. I brought it to Arcades and found Lotta’s mom, who tried to cold-shoulder me, and I told her—to her back—about the shell of the marble, and thereby convinced her to take the cure and raise it.
“You weren’t very nice to my daughter,” she said, tucking Bopsy—she’d named it on the spot—into one of her sleeves.
“I just gave you something you value,” I said. “And Valentine seems like a really good guy. I don’t need your fucken guiltmouth, Catrina.”
“He is a good guy,” she said, and walked away.
Then I paid for an hour with a woman named Naomi, and the hour made me happy, so I paid for seven more. In the morning, I went home, still couldn’t write.
Maybe, I thought, the dry spell was a Blank-related problem, after all. Having broken the first dry spell after Blank’s death, I’d previously rejected that possibility, but perhaps I hadn’t considered it properly, this newly Blankless life of mine. Maybe, I thought, the problem wasn’t that I was missing Blank, but rather that I wasn’t missing Blank enough. Because I didn’t, truth be told, all too actively miss it; not since those two weeks during which I’d mourned it. Once I’d started in on the pages I’d written between the first and second dry spells, Blank had begun to seem less like an appendage that had just been cut from me, and more like a long-lost friend; like someone I’d cared for a great deal at one point, but wouldn’t have expected to be in contact with, and so someone whose absence from my life didn’t create much impossible longing. And maybe that was shitty of me? Maybe I wasn’t honoring Blank’s memory? What did that mean, though? To honor Blank’s memory? Maybe, I thought, I needed to try a little harder to suffer more thoroughly.