I hope you’ll call me when you get the chance, and I hope you’re almost finished with whatever you’re working on and you’ll visit, and meet Sandrine, who I am not even a little nervous you two will get along great, you’re my two favorite people, but no pressure. Earliest I’ll come home is June, then hopefully come right back, new visa.
Love,
Clyde
* * *
The house was a mess, too messy to be seen by anyone but me, and it didn’t smell right, unless that was me, yet I didn’t consider any of that til just before Burroughs was supposed to arrive, and there wasn’t time to clean, let alone motivation, so I hastily filled a flask with Scotch, stuck a short glass in the pocket of my jacket, grabbed a printout of the transcript, the disc to which I’d copied the file, and the DVD of A Fistful of Fists, then brought them all out onto the stoop, my idea being to give Burroughs the impression that I wanted—rather than intending to prevent him from entering the house—to toast the completion of the transcript outdoors, where we could enjoy the night air.
I enjoyed the night air. Since the freeze had lifted some five weeks earlier, most days had highs in the upper sixties, and there hadn’t been an evening that had dropped below fifty. And I knew some people were alarmed about that—our freakish weather—and I knew those people would think that I was shallow—or would claim to think that I was shallow—for shamelessly enjoying our weather rather than condemning the causes of our weather and worrying about what it said about the state of the world and the shrinking capacity for human beings and other food-chain higher-ups to survive in the world, and maybe they’d be right, those other people, maybe it was shallow, and maybe my father’s unbridled delight in his harvest of the fruits of southern Europe’s economic collapse was similarly shallow, maybe we Magnets were in bad taste, enjoying the things we were able to enjoy when we should have been berating ourselves for enjoying them. Maybe we were shortsighted, blindly selfish, lived too close to our nerve ends, didn’t pay enough attention to the suffering of others, didn’t do enough to relieve that suffering, made the wrong noises, read the wrong books, wrote the wrong books for not-right people who hadn’t any business reading books anyway, given all the suffering they could help relieve if they weren’t reading books, the right or the wrong ones. Maybe we were, in our little ways, helping to hasten the rise of tyrants, the rise of sea levels, the fall of man, the end of humanity. Or maybe just I was. In my little way. How could I know? How could anyone know? I’m not saying they couldn’t. I’m saying I didn’t. I’m saying I don’t and, because I don’t, I fail to imagine how others might. Yet others seemed to. They seemed to know. They seemed to think they knew what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was bad, and what impact they made on what and who, and how to destroy the least amount of good, how to prevent the most amount of evil, how to progress toward solving the world if only everyone else would listen, and all I knew was what I liked and didn’t like, what moved me and what didn’t, what I found beautiful and what I found ugly, who I found attractive and who I found repellent, and I wasn’t very good at knowing even those things, but the point is, reader, it was nice outside, to me it felt nice, and despite my father’s letters, the news of his happiness, the thought that he might have met a lovable woman who could love him in return, the thought that he’d discovered a way of life that appealed to him among people who appealed to him and that he wouldn’t (it looked like) die too early of early retirement (which I suppose I’d been worrying about more than I’ve let on), and the news that other writers admired my books (writers I’d heard of, but hadn’t yet read, haven’t yet read), and that one of those writers had bothered to think about and misunderstand the swingset murders in a way that sounded flattering and deliberate and made Clyde proud—despite all of it, the only thing I had, out there on the stoop—the only thing I found myself actually enjoying—was the weather. The air on my face. All the rest of it was distant, stuck behind this book, my failure to finish it, or my failure to give up on it (hard to say which). Except for the pleasant weather and the failures, it all might as well have been happening to somebody else.
Yet that was nothing dramatic. Not really. It wasn’t. I may have been in crisis, but I wasn’t in danger. I knew that much. I may have been broken, but only metaphorically, only “inside.” I was having trouble writing was all. I was having trouble not feeling ambivalent. I was finding it impossible to not feel ambivalent. For some people—many—that would, I know, count as a lovely kind of problem to have, but I wasn’t some people, I was only one person, I was only me, and for me…
What I’m trying to say is the night air was nice, and that wasn’t a lot, or didn’t seem like a lot, didn’t seem like enough, but then why put the stress on that wasn’t a lot? on what it didn’t seem like? or, for that matter, on what it did seem like? What it was, in itself, the night air, to me, was nice. The night air was nice. It felt nice on my face. It was nice out. I liked it. I liked the night air and I told myself I liked it, and I lit up a Quill, opened my flask, and inhaled some Scotch fumes. That was nice, too, I guess, now that I recall. It was fine is what it was. Everything would be fine.
Burroughs appeared while I was sniffing my flask. He’d arrived on foot.
“What are you hiding in that flask?” he said.
“MacGuffin Fifteen.”
“Good stuff,” he said. “To drink some of that stuff, a man might be willing to become unwomanly.”
I poured some Scotch in the glass for him. He unbuttoned his jacket and sat down beside me, took up half the stoop. We cheers’d, we swigged, we exhaled audibly. I handed him the transcript and the DVD. “So what’s the next step?” I said, not much caring. “You start printing out copies, or give me notes for revision, or…?”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Burroughs said, then went on to explain that the reason he came over to pick up the transcript (instead of instructing me to mail the transcript, or drop the transcript off at the compound guard booth) was that the screening of A Fistful of Fists had been canceled. The screening had been canceled sometime mid-October, and until I’d left him my voicemail that morning, neither he nor Trip had thought to let me know about the cancellation, or perhaps—if he was being entirely honest, he said—perhaps they’d thought to, then simply forgotten to. In either case, when Trip had returned from school that afternoon, at which time Burroughs had told him that I’d called, he’d wanted to come over and break the news to me himself. On top of fearing that I’d be disappointed in him over the cancellation of the screening, Trip felt terrible, Burroughs said, for having wasted so much of my time, but Jonboat refused to allow Trip to see me, refused to even allow him to call me, and after father and son had finished yelling at each other, Trip demanded Burroughs come over in his stead, and asked him to please break the news to me softly. “I told him,” Burroughs said, “that I didn’t think you’d be all that broken up, having made so much money and all, but still he insisted, and he wanted me to tell you the contract still holds.”