Authors: Emily Schultz
That the changes occurred first in her writing. That while I was there staring at the great blank carrige of the typewriter that sat in a makeshift corner of our living room, I could hear Zoe’s fingers snapping over the keys in the room she insisted be all her own, her ancient computer groaning through the walls whenever she hit Control + S, which was often. That what began as a poem, “Ode to Amethyst Light,” sprinkled with borrowed terms from meteorology, could blow easy-breezy into a series of poems, and then one book-length prose poem, and then an actual, bona fide novel, with seemingly no effort at all. That she became, finally, a calm person, a sophisticated, patient person I didn’t know, one who meditated or went for walks when she was irked with me, when she “needed to understand” me better, this person who wasn’t looking for scandal or accolades or instant satisfaction any more, but was more concerned with what she was making happen on an illuminated square just a foot or two outside of her head — a strange, solitary sphere entirely different from her hedonistic world.
That in only thirteen or fourteen months she became a person who claimed she had supported me, who claimed it was my turn to support her in her writing career. That she was right, without making a pretzel of the argument. And worse, that it stung dreadfully.
That I sent out a bad first draft of a second novel, and confided to Zoe, and my old roommate, and Susan and Janey, and Zoe’s beautiful gang of misfits, and anyone who would listen, that I was sure it would be accepted anyway, “given the state of publishing.” That I went drinking — yes, I did — for the entire twelve months it took for the manuscript, and the rejection notice, to come back to me. That the notice was not even on letterhead, but on a quarter-cut scrap of paper bearing an over-inked wood stamp (purple) with the publisher’s mailing address, as if some intern had printed off the slips in bulk, four to a page to save on paper, and cut them apart with scissors and stamped them for me and the other losers. That the message read:
Dear Author, thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, it is not right for our publishing house at this time. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere. Please do not contact us for comments; regrettably, our schedules do not allow us the time to make individual assessments. Best wishes, The Editors.
That, because I had published my first novel with this house, the editor — singular — took the time to scrawl in blue pen on the back:
Thanks, Graham. Sorry, maybe the next one
. That the slip of paper inscribed with so much weight, so much heartbreak and rejection, was the size of a grade-school valentine and held on by a lone blue paper clip. That I felt it clipped to my throat before my eyes had even scanned the generic
thanks/no thanks
.
That I called up the editor and told him I understood completely, one hundred percent, that I had known it wasn’t quite there yet but that I was reworking it and would you like to see it again, and no, no, that was fine too, no hard feelings, sure we’ll get a beer sometime, and that’s all right anyway because there was this great little press I had just heard about in Wisconsin and maybe I would try there, and could I use your name in the letter, and thank you, thanks, thanks so much, and sure I’d tell Zoe you said hi, and yes, she
was
working on something, and yes it
was
a novel, but no, it wasn’t ready yet, and likely it wouldn’t be for a very long time, if at all, well, you know Zoe, but sure, of course, of course, I would remember to tell her to tell you more about it, and okay, well then, and guess that’s goodbye . . .
That during this time, when I came into the room, Zoe would hold up her finger, lick her lips, eyes dancing across the monitor before her, both monitor and eyes glowing green, green, and greener still in the fast-darkening house. That in the end, she — an English dropout peddling cantaloupe-coloured skirts at The Limited, although she wouldn’t shop anywhere but the Salvation Army — went on to write the kind of beach volume she disdained. That it was an eight-hundred-page best-selling novel in which the, ahem, wind took on the soul of the protagonist’s dead grandmother and related their entire family history across three generations, all within a few moments in the protagonist’s greatest hour of need.
That the boxes, labelled
Author
, arrived the day before Zoe was to move out. That it was 8:30 a.m. when the doorbell rang. That I was half-naked, hung-over, throat still dry as Styrofoam chips. That I had puked ouzo only a couple of hours before and was now standing in my homeliest pair of boxers, the ones that were ripped at the waistband. That I was cursing the refrigerator because it failed to contain a carton of milk, and staring into a bath of black coffee that smelled like the Detroit River after spring thaw. That when the knock came, echoing through the half-packed-up duplex, Zoe peered out the window, saw the courier’s truck, and jerked open the door with a big
whoosh
, in spite of our attire, letting the March air stiffen her nipples beneath the unbleached tank top that she wore to bed. That I knew this, even from behind her in the kitchen, where I danced on the cold tiles and hid my abhorrent, scrawny, hairy, boxered self behind the fridge door, yelling “Zoe!” and subjecting myself to further shrinkage. That the delivery person was not a man but a woman, with a close-cropped orange scalp not unlike Zoe’s own (recently), who looked as though she could have been Zoe’s big brother/sister, especially as she held the box atop her shoulder while presenting Zoe with an electric clipboard, a pen-shaped object, and several unhidden glances from Zoe’s neck down to her Chinese slippers as Zoe fumbled with her own name.
That Zoe said, “It’s my novel!” revolving between me and Annie Lennox as though we should both be thrilled on her behalf. That the woman said, “That so?” and “Congratulations!” That I said nothing. That I wouldn’t come out from behind the refrigerator door until the courier had gone, and then I saw that I had spilled coffee down the side of one boxer leg, and the garment was sodden and clung to me, emphasizing the way my balls had curled up like a pair of baby piglets.
That she opened the box in front of me and sighed, peeling the luscious aquamarine matte jacket off to see her name — Zoe Silver, she had decided just before it went to print, not Zoe Silver-Little — embossed on the everlasting black cloth spine.
That my eye should catch on the first word of the title as she redressed her work:
Goodbye
. That as she was folding the silky dust jacket around the book again, a stitch of fatigue, frustration, or uncertainty appeared on Zoe’s forehead above the bridge of her nose, a shape like a scallop, and she turned the thing over, then back, then dropped it into the box with the others, like it didn’t mean a thing. That the tome landed with a resounding, unforgettable
thud.
That I continue to hear this sound even now, in that moment when I am just about to fall asleep. That, like a lucid dream, I feel myself falling and the book falling instantly in my mind, the two at the same time,
thud
— for seven years,
thud
and
thud
and a thousand
thud
s, and even after death, it seems, this sound, this
thud,
unlike the other
ka-thunk
s and
ker-plunk
s that exist in the universe — will jerk me bolt upright, clutching at the bedclothes, or, if I’m sitting upright already, as I do at work, the arms of my chair.
Gordon leaned back in his chair and ran his eyes over what he had written. He had composed nine pages of sentence fragments, but the question of grammar was less important to him than whether the content itself would fly. He wiped a hand down his face, erasing his expression and preparing for what came next. Given that everything in his life had been possible, it did seem to Gordon that his continued existence after death was real — as real as anything else. And under the glow of Heaven’s fluorescents it was easy to believe in contact between the worlds. The light fixtures poured a tranquil, humming liquor over his head.
A hundred more pages
, Daves had said. That was in addition to what he’d already written. If it was to meet their purposes it had to add up to almost two hundred pages in layout. Gordon’s lips welded around his pen. Bouncing it up and down with his tongue, the Paper Mate became a conductor’s baton as Gordon began typing again, fingers gaining momentum. He did not know whether the screen remained blank or was filling with words as steadily as rain coming in through a carelessly raised window at night in a bedroom now long gone. He did not know whether his fingers were moving or whether God or magnetics moved them for him. He was like a boy with a wobbly Ouija board in his lap, consumed by near-carnal exhilaration and trepidation. Gordon’s pale, furred knuckles trembled over letters. He did not type so much as feel an unconscious swelling of music that made itself into a membrane between himself and the illuminated offices in which he sat, alone. The trembling black tongue of the pen extended from his lips, a strange snake. His shapeless hair had been tugged up unconsciously in the back. His eyes, sombre and devious, darted back and forth.
Now he was not bent over a desk at all but lying in grass, the smell of mud stuck up his nostrils; he was throat-deep in the astringent perfumes of women, from the talc of the first squeaky-voiced girl he had danced with in high school to the lime-laced breath of Chloe’s thighs. Or he was running, the concrete of urban streets reverberating in his kneecaps and his skeletal rib cage, the yellow splintered street lights of youth swinging on cabled breaths. What crept into being were the anthills of chapters.
The pen travelled from right mouth corner to left mouth corner, assumed an erect stance, a flaccid position, and eventually dropped from his lips into his lap, only to be collected again in a moment of inspiration as someone in the Design Department cruised in early and set about shredding the night with the push of a button and the whirr of a scanner drum. All night Gordon had followed himself from birth to Heaven, documenting everything he could remember, no matter how translucent or vague. When he couldn’t remember, he tore the roofs off the apartments in which he had lived and let the walls and flotsam-jetsam possessions remain true, floating amid the fakery, added men and women to the rooms like small effigies and moved them about among his furnishings, until their plastic faces felt somehow better than the truth. And when that seemed not to work, he resorted to his favourite method — random lists.
The things Gordon found he remembered most clearly were not his living moments but his dreaming ones. He had never been one who dreamed. That was Chloe territory. Still he could hear her recounting her own sagas, until they became in his memory a single endless dream:
“I dreamt that you were a zebra and I was a mouse . . .”
“We were stuck in the middle of the French Revolution . . .”
“I was explaining various sex toys to my mother . . .”
“I dreamt my aunt edited my
Complete Works of Chaucer
textbook . . .”
“We went to a party but I was wearing only these godawful underpants . . .”
“We tried to escape but it started to snow . . .”
“Then I was dating an actor . . .”
“You were sitting in a bathtub with your clothes on, but you had no legs, only an empty pair of pants . . .”
“I was in a schoolbus with my little sister and it was filling up with water . . .”
“I was in The Limited storeroom again . . .”
“I lay down at work and watched all of the workplace continue around me from the vantage point of the carpet . . .”
Gordon had always denied to Chloe that he had dreams; he claimed he forgot them the instant he opened his eyes. But now they came floating back to him, the way they occasionally had in that second when he lay back down at night. At Heaven the dreams seemed more vivid, and the characters who peopled them as real as any Gordon had actually met during his life.
He recalled other odd things as well. Small moments that had occurred while he was alive now seemed to stretch out and weigh more heavily. For example, a woman he had once passed on the subway car. She had stepped off as he was getting on; there had been an uncanny familiarity to her, as if she was a long-lost cousin or a kindergarten classmate now grown. At the same time Gordon had been certain he had never seen her before. They had both turned back and she had opened her mouth as if to speak before the doors clunked closed between them. Things like that. Or the time about six months after the publication of Chloe’s first book: coincidentally they had been riding at opposite ends of the same crowded subway car. Gordon had caught a glimpse of Chloe’s head from behind, one of her thumbs wrapping the pole, her sandals peeking out among the corduroy, blue jeans, and houndstooth. Although he had never seen this particular pair of sandals before, Gordon had been certain they were Chloe’s, as were the feet inside them, not to mention that thumb — hers, with its trim white cuticle. His heart hung on his tongue. Would she see him? Would they speak, they who had lived and slept and showered together? He had been paralyzed by the prospect. When the crowd shifted, sandals and hair were blocked. Then there had been only that one digit within his view, still holding on, and he had known it as hers from fifty feet away. Even in his panic he loved the thumb so much he had ridden three extra stops to continue memorizing it — and he never spoke of the moment to anyone. All of these things Gordon now documented.