Private Novelist (7 page)

I opened the door and he looked up. “I recognize you now,” I said. “You're the mailman.”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“Is this Part Five?”

“This is actually Part Ten,” he said. “I was getting really impatient. Will you live with me in Austria?”

“Let me get my coat,” I said. “It looked kind of snowy.”

“You can borrow mine,” he said, but I shook my head. I got my coat and hat, the diamond, and a violet from the basement. He tucked the violet into his pocket and we climbed into the truck. We drove thirty miles to Metroform without seeing another person or car. “What's S.T.A.R.?” I asked.

He put both hands on the steering wheel. “What do you know about freedom?”

“It's when you get to do what you want. Like me, right now.”

“But you see, I already know what you want, because I articulated it for you myself. I've seduced you in the most wicked and shameless way, by telling you a story when you were alone and you couldn't help listening.”

“I don't mind.”

“S.T.A.R. is my family's waste management company. I guess we're best known for the secret tunnel from the Black Sea to the South Asian effluent containment bunker. Very rich, very evil.”

“Do any of those places in the diamond still exist?”

“Those shots were all taken on my family's estate.”

“In Austria?”

“No, in Western Metro. It used to be a famous park.”

“Then we'll go to Austria. We'll live there in your cave full of holograms or whatever it is.”

He smiled and held my hand. The lamb woke up and stretched himself. The sun was rising behind us, making flashes of white run across the sky as the skyscrapers' reactive armor fought off the solar wind. In a parking lot our ICBM was waiting.

(End interlude)

In Long Island City, addresses are assigned on a highly rational system. Anyone wishing to find 5-16 Forty-Seventh Road, for example, knows if he turns left off Fifth Avenue it will be the ninth house on the north side. Forty-Seventh Street is one block south, and runs the other way. The cold anonymity of the L.I.C. streets, where shopping bags blow like dead leaves past thousands of identical Greek superettes and shuttered Irish bars, and storm drains breathe an odor of
sewage as in the fictional work above, always seemed to me a portent of our common future. Through L.I.C. runs Queens Boulevard, eight lanes wide and arrow straight from Jamaica to the East River, lined with delis, lunch counters, and shops, with a stoplight on every block, so that never a pedestrian is run over but with his entire family, seven in one blow, and always by a driver whose license has been suspended 127 times. Really. Read the
New York Post
for a week and try counting the Queens Boulevard dead, keeping in mind that they report only accidents involving babies in strollers or vehicles that jump the curb.

Yigal stood up, buttoned his shirt, and walked toward the center of Bern, looking for an open bakery.

PAMELA
WAS PUBLISHED IN 1740,
Tristram Shandy
in 1759. Such infinite progress in nineteen short years!
Pamela,
as we already know, is an embarrassment, a bore, and a model for
Justine,
regularly forced on students of English literature for its historic significance.
Tristram,
on the other hand, is held to be a “bawdy” and “ribald” work like those catalogs of “conquered” “strumpets,”
Tom Jones
et al., and routinely ignored. How I loathe, in retrospect, the old-maidenly prissiness, worthy of Samuel Richardson himself, that could perceive soft-core porn in
Tristram Shandy,
effectively discouraging me from opening the book until well into my thirty-third year of life.

On reading it, I discovered, of course, that it is a mildly adult version of
The Pickwick Papers.
Uncle Toby Shandy, a retired army officer given to pet obsessions, spends his days reconstructing famous battles in miniature with the help of a witty and loyal servant. A groin injury has made Uncle Toby hopelessly benign, gentle, and patient, winning him the undying love of the widow next door who is, however, eager to know the exact nature of the injury.

The same professors who knew just enough to label
Tristram
Shandy
“bawdy” and “ribald” were eager to teach from
Naked Lunch,
if only they could have gotten permission. Meanwhile, they taught Faulkner, the same as in high school. I.e., the problem with
Tristram
wasn't its being too grown up; it was too juvenile. They didn't want to listen to us giggle about the groin injury—they'd rather send us down to Yoknapatawpha County to watch the inbred morons accidentally drilling holes in their dead mother's face.
Naked Lunch
was more Faulkner, with a bigger drill. And the ineffable, unforgettable saintly sweetness of Uncle Toby Shandy, later transferred so successfully to Mr. Pickwick, became a forgotten relic, something no one alive today thinks English literature ever possessed, except me.

Mr. Chips, Mrs. Miniver, Lassie, Seymour Glass—these later types of ghastly saccharine horror have nothing to do with the mature and truly humble generosity of Mr. Pickwick, who does his best to organize worthwhile club outings for the entertainment of his friends while endlessly tolerating the same poor parasites (he doesn't work for his money, after all) and supporting the same poor drunks (he likes drinking too). After reading
The Pickwick Papers,
I accepted Mr. Pickwick into my heart as my personal lord and savior, and I never pass a wino without giving him two dollars. When people ask me for loans I just hand them the money, saying, “If I'm ever so down and out that I need three hundred dollars, I'll know who to call.”

But I knew better than to mention Mr. Pickwick to Zohar when I left Philadelphia and had a sort of potlatch, dispensing thousands of dollars' worth of electronics, my bicycle, drums, guitars, amplifiers, and so on to my friends. I let him think what he wanted. Mr. Pickwick is the Israeli Antichrist,
the original and supreme
freier
(sucker). A specter is haunting Israel—the specter of Mr. Pickwick. . . .

Yigal was a little tight, dirty, and looking for a bakery at 7:30
P.M.
on a Sunday night in Bern. The odds were 5 to 1 against him (there was an open
Konditorei,
but on a street he'd probably miss), and around 9:00 he was looking for a ride out of town. Two hours after that he was being turned away from the youth hostel. If not for the Rastafarian junkies at the bear pits, he would have slept in the park. He woke up on an uneven wooden floor. It was early morning, almost dark, but he walked out into the village street and found a bakery, bright and warm, with thick cream for the coffee and loaves of bread as big as cases of beer. He ate onion pie and two poppy seed pinwheels.

Maybe, like Osnat, you are asking, at this point, “Why is Yigal so poor? Can't he stay in hotels and ride the train? Isn't he a senior agent for a black-budget super-secret all-powerful worldwide network of maverick spymasters?” But please remember that Yigal was traveling incognito. It isn't so hard—you can tell your name to anyone you want and say exactly what you're doing, but you have to remember not to use credit cards. Yigal was an experienced super-spy, so he remembered. He had lots of money left, but he had an idea he might want it for something before he got to Lindau. He was thinking of buying a tent. In Lindau he could pick up a lot of money he'd mailed himself in a cardboard box. There was a pleasant little jazz bar there, where they knew him, the Fischerin. They were always extra nice to him because they figured he was an ecstasy dealer.

At the edge of the village was a tall forest bordered by a deep meadow. He took a few steps into the wet grass, then
looked down with a sinking feeling. How come I always forget? he thought. Every time I'm in Northern Europe it's the same damn thing. He slid forward, grimacing. The meadow was knee-deep in slugs, each under its own blade of grass, oozing a slime that wouldn't wash off—water would just spread it around—his boots would dry silver white. He had never seen the banana slug of the Pacific Northwest, but he knew a slug so conspicuous and easy to avoid could not possibly be more revolting than the endless millions, living and dead, under and around his feet in this one idyllic Swabian pasture. He had heard that New Zealand harbors a snail so large it fills the evolutionary niche normally occupied by . . . he tried to remember—he recalled vaguely that the New Zealand grasshopper is so big that it functions as a mouse, but couldn't remember what the snail does. In any case, it's a foot long, and he had no plans to visit New Zealand.

The desert is so clean and pure, he thought. I should take the M16 and drive down the Egyptian border to where the mountains look like bare, golden, freshly swept stairs. As a rotting log broke open under his foot, revealing a wet safety-orange slime mold, he thought of the dry, delicate geckos that used to run across his kitchen ceiling, and of miniature blue-black birds flashing like obsidian against the dusty green of feral geraniums in the backyard. Then he remembered that if he went home, he would have to report in. What will I tell Rafi? Rafi, it's like this: I've narrowed down the search to two families—two clans, that is—two countries: Laos and Iceland. I'm certain the heir will be found in one of those two places, in a remote cliffside cave where I can say I did it, collect the bounty and get the hell off this ridiculous project which is destroying my career and all my relationships. I just know if I weren't always traveling, Nofar would go out with
me. I feel like a sailor. It's no wonder she won't give me the time of day . . .

Yigal found a logging road and stopped to scrape his soles on the gravel. He realized that the slugs must once have had a predator, now extinct. He imagined the unicorns using their horns to lift the meadow thatch and reveal the slugs below, then eagerly munching them with their strong teeth and coarse tongues. What horror the virgins must have felt when the unicorns laid their slimy chins and stiff beards in their laps, how they screamed for the huntsman to come quickly, then the purely decorative nature of the roast unicorn centerpiece, its inedible meat slippery as okra. In his mind's eye, he saw the male unicorns' vicious battles for possession of the richest meadows and creek bottoms, where long brown slugs grew thick and fast as mushrooms.

He closed his eyes and pretended he was somewhere near Be'er Sheva in a field of crispy weeds and Roman coins, then sat down in the road to check his e-mail. There was a long message from his old friend Osnat. Secretly he hated her a little. When a girl like that hangs around a man like me, he knew well, saying she thinks I'm sweet, it means she doesn't actually think of me as male. If she respected me a little, it would cross her mind that her behavior ought to be driving me insane. Doesn't it occur to her that calling a man at six in the morning to cry about some fucked-up love affair is a tease? Why does she dress like that?

Osnat wrote,
Thanks for putting me in touch with Coppola's people. I'm helping them scout locations. Call me when you get into town. Yigal, I hope you're taking care of yourself—please play safe. . . .

This motherly tone, Yigal thought, makes me sick. He wrote:
What Coppola's people? I forget things, you know. I may be coming home soon. Amsterdam always makes me miss the sunshine. I don't think I've been outdoors in a week. I'll call you.

It's true what she said about scouting locations—Osnat was taking Mary to every café in town. I went with them to Café Tamar. They sat talking for two hours while four young men, all with open notebooks, eavesdropped. I sat down with one and he froze like a rabbit.

“Are you a poet?” I asked.

“I'm a rapper, an MC,” he said in a wee, soft voice. “I can work better in a place like this. It helps me to let the rhymes flow.” He crossed his legs, above the knee. “That girl, she's poetry in motion.”

“You're an idiot,” I said, standing up. I tried the next one.

“What are you writing, poetry?” I asked.

“Not yet. It's sort of a manifesto. I think the poetry of today is corrupt, bankrupt, meaningless—there's nothing of significance left for it. We need a hard, merciless, thrusting poetry that won't take no for an answer.” He fidgeted nervously with an empty sugar packet. I tried the next one.

“Is that poetry?” I asked.

“It's a letter,” the man said. “My girlfriend won't marry me. I really love her, but she thinks because I'm already married, it's not worth it for her. Well, I'm a man who can think for himself, and in this case I think I have rights. Let me show you.” He began to dig around in his book bag, and I moved on to the fourth and last.

“Are you writing poetry?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Here's my latest poem. ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers—'”

“That's Delmore Schwartz.”

“You know it?” He looked disappointed. “Okay, how about
this. ‘The heavy bear accompanies me, honey covers his face, awkwardly staggering around—'”

“Are all your poems translations of Delmore Schwartz?”

“No, right now, looking at your friend, I have an idea for a poem based on Ginsberg's ‘Song.'” He began scribbling in the notebook. “The weight of the world is love,” I saw over his shoulder.

I went back to Osnat and Mary. Osnat was trying to talk Mary into being tested for HIV.

Thousands of miles off, the only Israeli in Eastern Bhutan was toiling uphill on foot, humming tunelessly and thinking about Piano Sonatas nos. 21, 23, and 26. At my suggestion he was carrying a plastic bag filled with water from the radiator—otherwise he would have died. I'd located a llama-trekking party from Portland, Oregon, just 250 miles away over the Nepalese border, and with the GPS ripped out of the Rover after the axle broke, he was making good time. Only once did he admit weakness. “I'm getting a hole in my sneaker,” he said ruefully, and my heart went out to my brave darling.