The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (36 page)

“To change the subject now,” I said, “what is it you are presently working on?”

“A novel entitled
The City at the Center of the Sun
,” he said.

“Could you grace us with a snippet of the plot?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, looking toward the ceiling, “it only came to me this morning in the tub. I saw a fellow, a rough and ready American named Dick Web, who travels in a cannon ball, shot by a gun the length of a train, to the sun. This cannon ball has a window, and he can study the stars. I want to be able to name in this novel all of the stars that I know. Let's see there's …”

“Yes,” I interrupted, knowing his inclination to wax taxonomic, “he goes to the sun and finds a city inside it. Then what happens?”

“Well, then he discovers that the city's citizenry are humanlike automata. While wandering the crowded streets of the city, he runs into a female who is the image of his dear, departed mother. She takes him on a tour of the city and introduces him to her lover who turns out to be an automaton Captain Nemo. The Nemoton, as I call it, is the proprietor of a small zoo that houses a rare beast with the power of mental telepathy …”

“It sounds splendid,” I told him.

“I hate it,” he said.

“Very well,” I countered, “could you give us an idea as to how much mail you get each day from your readers?”

“A veritable avalanche. People ask for autographs, for reviews of their books, for me to read their reams and reams of dribbling prose riddled with imagination as shriveled as a scrotal sac in cold, cold water. They tell me of their personal lives, their problems, their most intimate moments.”

“Answering these missives must be a drain on your time,” I said, mustering a look of sympathy.

“Not at all,” he said with a frown. “I throw them in the fireplace. Only once did one blow back into the room as I emptied the waste basket. I picked it up and started reading. It was from a woman who was reproaching me for my books. Because of my novels, her husband had been digging in their basement, hoping to uncover a hidden passageway on a veritable
Journey to the Center of the Earth
. She asked him what he expected to find there, and he told her a lost race of wise and kindly people.”

“Some do see the literary phantasm as a dangerous illusion,” I said.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I struck up a correspondence with this woman. Eventually she told me that her husband was lost underground, digging toward the
axis mundi
. The basement is nearly filled to the ceiling with dirt, and her husband is somewhere in a slowly moving capsule of space, displacing dirt in front of him and throwing it behind, blocking his escape as he goes. In her last letter, she thanked me for having written my books.”

“I must ask you about the wonderful inventions that inhabit your novels. If you were a machinist or mechanic and not a writer, what an amazing world we would live in.”

“And if I were a fisherman,” said Verne, “every day would be a battle with the fierce, flesh-tearing squid in the boiling waters off Madagascar. And if I were a gardener, my every hour I would be plucking the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and hiding behind the hedges as God walked in billowing robes. And if I were a blind man, I would be a constant point of darker blackness in the night, a hole into which everything would pour and be devoured.”

“Have you any inventions in your new novel?” I asked.

“So far, only a pair of spectacles one might wear in order to look through solid objects.”

“Brilliant,” I said.

“Yes,” he admitted, “it came to me after a dinner of rare lamb. A certain miasmatic disturbance fogged me into this prophecy of future technology.”

“Does your character Dick Web wear these glasses in order to read the hidden souls of automata?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he said with a smirk. “He wears them to see through the iron undergarments of the gear-work ladies of the city at the center of the sun.”

“Is there anything a man of your eminence fears?” I asked.

“I fear only one thing,” he replied, “the fall of the true body of Marlu. I have dreams of his clavicle splitting my head on a sunny morning on the streets of town. Then the doves will take me up and wing their way above the gaping maw of a dead volcano. I will be dropped and, after falling for days, will strike upon the head and kill that woman's husband who would have, at that precise moment, broken through the last wall of dirt and into the land of the wise and kindly ancients.”

With this said, the great writer rose and brushed the crumbs from his beard. “I must be off,” he said in an apologetic voice as precise as an invention for the vivisection of love. “My play,
Dr. Ox
, is premiering tonight, and I must begin the preparations for my journey to the theatre.”

I tried to shake his hand, but he bowed slightly instead as a way of putting me off.

“Kindly show yourself out,” he added, and then turned and left the library.

On my way out through the shadowy corridors of his home, I came across a shelf holding a large bell jar filled with clear blue water. At the bottom lay bleached sand and a diminutive reproduction of a toppled Roman column. Tiny star fish dotted the dunes, and floating midway in that Caribbean liquid was the body of a miniature man—a homunculus with a beard and open eyes betraying a profound sense of will. On a piece of masking tape affixed to the top of the jar, lightly written in pencil, were the words:
Nemo, do not feed!

From the time I first started reading real books, I've been a fan of Jules Verne. I have always been enamored of the juxtaposition of the anachronistic and the futuristic. Verne was, at times, a plodding prose stylist, but his work incorporated the elements of adventure and wondrous technology. The images generated by his stories have been some of the most vivid I have ever experienced. When I was around twelve years old, a publishing company reprinted a series of some of his more obscure titles:
The City in the Sahara, The Village in the Treetops, Off on a Comet,
etc. I scoured the racks at the local candy store for these and collected and read as many as I could. Along with the better known titles like
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth,
these books comprised my first forays into the world of science fiction. Their influence is everywhere in my fantasy trilogy that begins with
The Physiognomy.

One Christmas a few years ago I acquired three of the more famous Verne novels in one volume. The book had some of the original illustrations and was printed in that eye-strain style with small type in double columns. What I loved about the edition was that it had a piece of journalism from Verne's time in which a reporter visits and interviews him. Part of the piece is a description of a normal day in the life of Jules Verne. It told about his writing habits, his leisure activities, his wife, his home. I was envious of this reporter, so I decided that I would pretend to have visited Verne myself and write it up in the style of an interview. “High Tea” is not about the real Jules Verne though, it is about
my
Jules Verne, the one I still often visit in my imagination. This story was published by Gavin Grant and Kelly Link in their wonderful magazine
, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet.

Bright Morning

If there is one thing that distinguishes my books from others it is the fact that in the review blurbs that fill the back cover and the page that precedes the title page inside, the name of “Kafka” appears no less than eight times.
Kafka, Kafkaesque, Kafka-like, in the tradition of Kafka
. Certainly more Kafka than one man deserves—a veritable embarrassment of Kafka riches. My novels are fantasy/adventure stories with a modicum of metaphysical whim-wham that some find to be insightful and others have termed “overcooked navel gazing.” Granted, there are no elves or dragons or knights or wizards in these books, but they are still fantasies, none the less. I mean, if you have a flying head, a town with a panopticon that floats in the clouds, a monster that sucks the essence out of hapless victims through their ears, what the hell else can you call it? At first glance, it would seem that any writer would be proud to have their work compared to that of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, but upon closer inspection it becomes evident that in today's publishing world, when a novel does not fit a prescribed format, it immediately becomes labeled as Kafkaesque. The hope is, of course, that this will be interpreted as meaning
exotic
, when, in fact, it translates to the book-buying public as
obscure
. Kafka has become a place, a condition, a boundary to which it is perceived only the pretentious are drawn and only total lunatics will cross.

As my neighbor, a retired New York City transit cop, told me while holding up one of my novels and pointing to the cover, “Ya know, this Kafka shit isn't doing you any favors. All I know is he wrote a book about a guy who turned into a bug. What the fuck?”

“He's a great writer,” I said in defense of my blurbs.

“Tom Clancy's a great writer, Kafka's a putz.”

What could I say? We had another beer and talked about the snow.

Don't get me wrong, I like what I've read of Kafka's work. The fact that Gregor Samsa wakes from a night of troubling dreams to find that he has been transformed into a giant cockroach is, to my mind, certain proof of existential genius firing with all six pistons. Likewise, a guy whose profession is sitting in a cage and starving himself while crowds throng around and stare, is classic everyman discourse. But my characters run a lot. There's not a lot of running in Kafka. His writing is unfettered by parenthetical phrases, introductory clauses, and adjectival exuberance. My sentences sometimes have the quality of Arabic penmanship, looping and knotting, like some kind of Sufi script meant to describe one of the names given to God in order to avoid using his real name. In my plots, I'm usually milking some nostalgic sentiment resulting from unrequited love or working toward a punch line of revelation like an old Borscht Belt comic with a warmed-over variation of the one about the traveling salesman, whereas Kafka seems like he's trying to curtly elicit that ambiguous perplexity that makes every man an island, every woman an isthmus, every child a continental divide.

My friend, Quigley, once described the book
The Autobiography of a Yogi
as “a miracle a page,” and that's the kind of effect I'm striving for, building up marvels until it just becomes a big, hallucinogenic shit-storm of wonder. Admittedly, sometimes the forecast runs into a low-pressure system and all I get is a brown drizzle; such are the vicissitudes of the fiction writer. On the other hand, Kafka typically employed only one really weird element in each story (a giant mole, a machine that inscribes a person's crime upon their back) that he treats as if it were as mundane as putting your shoes on. Then he inspects it six ways to Sunday, turning the microscope on it, playing out the string, until it eventually curls up into a question mark at the end. There are exceptions, “A Country Doctor,” for instance, that swing from start to finish. I don't claim to be anywhere near as accomplished a writer as Kafka. If I was on a stage with Senator Loyd Benson and he said to me, “I knew Kafka, and you, sir, are no Franz Kafka,” I'd be the first to agree with him. I'd shake his damn hand.

I often wondered what Kafka would make of it, his name bandied about, a secret metaphor for
fringe
and
destination remainder bin
. For a while it really concerned me, and I would have dreams where I'd wake in the middle of the night to find Kafka standing at the foot of my bed, looking particularly grim, half in, half out of the shaft of light coming in from the hallway. He'd appear dressed in a funeral suit with a thin tie. His hair would be slicked back and his narrow head would taper inevitably to the sharp point of his chin. Ninety pounds soaking wet, but there would be this kind of almost visible tension surrounding him.

“Hey, Franz,” I'd say, and get out of bed to shake his hand, “I swear it wasn't my idea.”

Then he'd get a look on his face like he was trying to pass the Great Wall of China and haul off and kick me right in the nuts. From his stories, you might get the idea that he was some quiet little dormouse, a weary, put upon pencil pusher in an insurance office, but, I'm telling you, in those nightmares of mine, he really ripped it up.

Do you think Kafka would be the type of restless spirit to reach out from beyond the pale? On the one hand, he was so unassuming that he asked Max Brod to burn all of his remaining manuscripts when he died, while on the other hand, he wrote an awful lot about judgment. He might not have as much to do with my writing as some people say, but me and Franz, we go way back, and I'm here to warn you: the less you have to do with him the better. His pen still works.

It was 1972 and I was a junior at West Islip High School on Long Island. I was a quiet kid and didn't have a lot of friends. I liked to smoke pot and I liked to read, so sometimes I'd combine those two pleasures. I'd blow a joint in the woods behind the public library and then go inside and sit and read or just wander through the stacks, looking through different books. In those days, I was a big science fiction fan, and I remember reading
Martians Go Home, Adam Link, Space Paw, Time Out of Joint
, etc. In our library, the science fiction books had a rocket ship on the plastic cover down at the bottom of the spine. There were three shelves of these books and I read just about all of them.

One afternoon at the library, I ran into Bettleman, a guy in my class. Bettleman was dwarfish short with a dismorphic body—long chimp arms, a sort of hunchback, and a pouch of loose skin under his chin. He was also a certified math genius and had the glasses to prove it—big mothers with lenses thick as ice cubes. I came around a corner of the stacks and there he was: long, beautiful woman fingers paging through a book he held only inches from his face. He looked up, took a moment to focus, and said hello. I said hi and asked him what he was reading.