White Tiger on Snow Mountain (28 page)

I shrugged it off and trudged to the pastry shop, as if turning up for my shift. I would have been better off donning an apron and grabbing a tray—at least there’d be tips—but I wasn’t pretty and I couldn’t steam milk. As it was, I was more like a file clerk, a minor functionary in a distant suboffice of the vast and crumbling English department, itself teetering on collapse.

My table was taken so I sat nearby, glaring, until the interlopers left. Then I opened my laptop and got ready to get down to business. But my courage faltered before the blank screen, and I found myself dawdling again over the accidental sentence I’d discovered the night before.

“But every leaf is ever veering every moment evermore.” Really it was not too bad. It had a certain ring to it. I got more coffee and read it over a few more times. I jotted it down acrostic-wise on my scratch pad—“B.E.L.I.E.V.E.M.E.”—and doodled it out in script. Believe me. Believe me. Believe me.

“Do you?”

The voice was a whisper, soft and female, tickling my left ear. I jumped as if stung, but there was no one. I was tucked up alone in my corner. Could it be a next-door neighbor? A mouse in the wall? Then I noticed Jasmine. She had joined her tribe while my back was turned and was busy exhorting
them to release the inner beast. While they growled and whimpered around her, her eyes found mine, and though her lips kept forming the words of her monologue, her voice, in my ear, whispered only to me, asking: “Do you? Do you believe me now?” And at least for a moment, I did.

That moment passed. Our eyes unlocked, the sound came back, and her normal, grating tone returned. “You are a vibrant animal in touch with the inner fire of creativity. The flame of your goddess burns bright!” I shook it off. The clamor of the café closed back over me, and I told myself, Don’t worry. You are merely hallucinating. Get back to work. Enough nonsense. I had a real sentence about an imaginary veterinarian to finish.

I was determined to get some sleep that night, but when I got home, or rather got back to my friend the art critic’s home, I discovered that Princess had wet the bed. Princess, I hasten to add, was the cat I was sitting, tiny and imperious, narrow as my wrist and lithe as a ballerina in a black leotard, with fuzzy white legwarmers on her agile limbs. Her tail, long as her whole body, was like a separate being, swanning and aloof.

I locked the little bitch in the kitchen and stripped the bed. I scrubbed the mattress furiously with some fabric cleanser I found under the sink. As a result, the bed was now even wetter, plus it smelled like toxic chemicals mixed with urine. I brought a fresh blanket to the couch and lit the scented candles on the coffee table. Then I got out a legal pad and my last good pen, figuring my own writing would put me to sleep faster than any book.

But as soon as I lay down, my thoughts circled back to that minor attack of schizophrenia in the café. Is this what happens
when you spend your life thinking about make-believe characters—they start to talk? I knew madness was an occupational hazard, but I couldn’t afford insanity; I wasn’t covered. Still, crazy as it sounds, I’d often daydreamed about being crazy. There was a residential facility up the street from the pastry shop, and some of the patients stopped in. They were genial folk, though they had to be reminded not to smoke indoors and sometimes blocked the aisles with their rolling suitcases full of paper. The only people who carry around more paper than writers are nutjobs.

I’d actually found myself envying their lot: a clean room on a high floor that the government paid for and someone else cleaned. Warm, starchy meals and basic cable. In-house shrinks and free dental. Why couldn’t I just retire from the life of the mind? If writing is not a regular career, then it begs the question: How do you quit?

I focused on the candle flames, dancing in space like three sprites, Sage, Vanilla, and Original, who smelled like shampoo. Perhaps an answer would come, or at least a decent night’s sleep. I breathed. I shut my eyes. My brain slowly loosened its grip.

And then, in the darkness, I heard it. A broken, keening cry. I shivered as the shadows of the flames leapt across the walls—but this was no muse or madness come to call. Princess was whining in the kitchen. I even saw a paw slide under the door, like a tiny burglar’s white-gloved hand. Knowing I’d never get to sleep this way, I released her, though I made a point of snubbing her too. Of course she turned loving and contrite. She leapt up and purred in a circle, settling on the legal pad I held in my lap, and with that soft bundle warming my belly, I passed out at last.

I don’t know if it was the cat or the candles, the crippling couch or the urine in the air, but I had a wild dream. I was flying a pyramid through outer space, wearing one of those retro spacesuits, a tight white one-piece with a fishbowl helmet, sitting at a vast control panel covered in dials and plugs and a row of piano keys that blinked rainbow colors when pressed. I don’t really know how to play music, and if I did, it would not be electronic dance music, but that is what emerged from my fingers as I steered my craft across the galaxies. Then I crashed. Crawling through my wrecked ship, dragging myself toward a crack of light, I realized: This was the womb, the air hose attached to my belly was an umbilical cord, and I was about to be born. My journey had been through the darkness of time, not space!

I forced my helmet through the opening, and it broke like an eggshell as I wriggled from my suit. I was naked now, creeping through the warm mud of some stinky, primeval jungle. Somehow the disco still throbbed all around, a house beat with a heavy bottom. I hate that kind of music. Birds and lizards screeched along, thunder boomed, and forks of lightning set the trees aflame. Finally I arrived at a temple, thirsty, hungry, exhausted. A maze of steps, it rose from the muck to the sun. And there, at the top, stood Jasmine, resplendent in a leopard bikini, glitter all over her body, necklaces now chunked with diamonds, emeralds, and rubies. A peacock-feather headdress shimmered like a waterfall to her ass. Her right hand wielded a golden sword, while her left lofted a tray crowded with bright pastries and steaming drinks. She sang out to the roaring music, as though we were in a nightclub, “Who ordered the decaf mocha latte?”

I woke with a start. The candles were out, and I sat up, knocking Princess to the floor with my crumpled pad as I fumbled for the lamp. She screeched and gave me a dirty look, then turned her tail. The downstairs neighbors were either having a party or sex, or both, as the disco pumping through the floor was accompanied by the occasional cry or grunt. Then I noticed the pad. I didn’t recall writing a word before I fell asleep, but there, in my very own lefty handwriting, it said:

Jasmine

601 W 113 St. 5A

Come now

5

I went. What else could I do? I didn’t understand what was happening to me, but whether I was insane, or psychic, or still dreaming, or caught in a magic spell, what was the difference? I still saw only two options: go to her or go to the hospital. I might as well try her first. Worst case, she called the cops and I got a free ride to the nuthouse. Either way, I was done for. Why turn back now?

Three a.m., and frigid, Broadway was at peace. The reds, greens, and yellows unraveled in strings as cabs swam by in silence. Here and there, a drunk wove home, a homeless shadow huddled. Above the violet streetlights and the mountains of brick and stone, heaven’s cold vault darkly gleamed, a blackness pierced with pure light from the future or the past. I walked fast, in a rush to do this before I lost my nerve or the cold air woke me.

I found her building. I buzzed, rehearsing my apologetic speech—how could I even explain who I was, the surly guy from the coffee shop? She didn’t know my name!—but she buzzed me in immediately, without a word, as if she had been waiting, and indeed, when the elevator arrived at her floor, she was there, in her robe, at her door.

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. But she put a finger to her lips, beckoning me on, and as I entered her tiny lamp-lit studio, she stepped back and let her robe fall open. Just as in my dream, her sleep-scented pajamas were covered in a leopard print, and on her narrow, unmade bed, the sheets and pillowcases bore a peacock-feather design, a hundred aquamarine eyes regarding me serenely.

“I’m sorry,” I choked and began to sob. “I’m so sorry.” But she pressed a finger to my lips and led me to the bed, where she held me tight until I fell into a sweet and dreamless sleep.

When I woke up late the next morning, my mind was clear, and even through closed eyes, I perceived the truth: I’d been a fool. There was never any struggle, any failure, except in my own head. What did it matter if I was published or not, read or not? Perhaps my whole purpose was to write one sentence that one soul would find tomorrow or a thousand years from now, long after the name on my gravestone was worn smooth. What did it matter if I filled a dozen pages today or wrote a single word? Doing, to the best of one’s ability, what one has been sent here to do: This is the definition of happiness.

Happily, my eyes opened, and I realized Jasmine was gone. On her pillow was an open notebook, with the place held by a
pen. “Good morning,” the note said, “I have done my morning writing and gone to meet a client. Green tea and fruit in the kitchen. Help yourself! XO—J”

Humming, I went to the closet of a kitchen. I’m not really a breakfast person, and I prefer coffee to tea, but it was all about being open to change, so I put the kettle on and took a bite of apple. Not bad! Then, while I waited for the water to boil, I got curious. I had never yet read her own writing. Was it wrong to peek at her notebook? I’d never been a snoop, but surely she didn’t mind if she’d left it open with a note to me inside.

I turned back to her entry for that day. It was numbers, just numbers, arranged in rows across the ruled lines, adorned with exclamations points and question marks, splattered with green tea. Confused, I flipped back, page after page. One was all
X
s, one just the words “Sample Sale” over and over. Most were gibberish, random letters, making less sense even than my blind typing, not words at all but pure nonsense neatly printed in block capitals, running on, line after line. Yet it was all carefully and cleanly inscribed. It had to have taken many hours, even days of concentration. Panic seized me as I gazed around the room. It had been dim in there the night before, and it was only now, in the light of day, that I realized: The whole wall was covered in shelves, and each shelf was packed tight with these notebooks. Swallowing hard, I pulled one out and opened it. Both sides of every page were filled with nothing but the alphabet, endlessly repeated. I grabbed another: unpronounceable nonsense in dialogue form, like a play performed by babies for a hundred pages. The next was more numbers, one long algebraic equation, adding up to total madness. I opened book after
book, growing more and more frightened as the avalanche of letters and numbers and meaningless words overwhelmed me.

Three filing cabinets crowded the wall between the kitchen and the door. I slid one open and found more chaos: cleanly typed manuscripts covered in perfect rows of pointless babble, files stuffed with papers filled with cursive
Z
s and
Y
s, notepads covered in zeros. I began a frantic search, tearing the place apart, like a thief or a cop with a search warrant, seeking a clue, a key. But there was nothing. All I found was a wilderness of writing, typed, scribbled, or painstakingly printed in her clear, pretty hand.

The kettle began to whistle, but I didn’t answer. I got to my knees. I shut my eyes. I prayed. GOD PLEASE JUST LET ME DO ONE BEAUTIFUL THING BEFORE I DIE.

Perhaps one night I might save a child from a burning house. If not, then let it be a story or a poem. Not this one. It’s too late for this one now, I know. But maybe the next one, tomorrow.

Then I turned the stove off and I left, locking the door behind me. And I never went back to that fucking pastry shop again.

The Amateur

It was in Paris, in the Luxembourg Gardens, talking with two friends in the outdoor café, that I met the strange American. I didn’t notice him at first—though perhaps I registered him subconsciously, a figure on the periphery, the older fellow in a flat cap and belted tweed jacket, a sun-browned face, sketch pad tilted against his metal table, thick fingers black with charcoal—but as it turned out, he had been listening to us the whole time.

We were discussing love and art and such things, or they were, my friends, for my benefit. Usually we discussed hair, movies, and what to eat next. My friend X was an important scarf designer; a new job had brought her to Paris. Y was on a fellowship in Berlin and had come to eat and drink for the weekend. I was the poor relation, staying with X, dining with Y, all as a distraction from my latest broken heart: As if I could leave that busted pump behind in New York, drop it off at the junkyard, and fly away with only a receipt in my wallet. Instead I carried it in my breast pocket like a pet, feeding it crumbs of cheese and chocolate, trying to soothe it, drug it, drown it
in beauty really—the blazing purplepinks of the flower beds, the patterned carpet of steps and splitting paths, statues of pale gods and angels seeming to vibrate in the warm air, the silver trees, the rain-colored roof slates and stone streets, the smooth-shouldered girls in printed frocks and office boys in white shirts and striped ties in the windows across from my room who laughed and waved when I realized they could see me, hair damp from the shower, emerging from the bathroom in my towel.

We finished our coffees. My friends had to go. They were busy. I was not. So I stayed, ordering a mint soda—they taste like toothpaste, but I love them—and wrestled with desire, toying with the single Gauloise I’d bummed from my friend: I hadn’t smoked in a year. That was when the older fellow appeared, or made himself known, I should say.

“Excuse me.” He spoke American English, with a profound New York accent. “Do you need a light?”

“Sure,” I answered. “Thanks.” Fate had decided. He leaned over and flicked a gold lighter. I breathed in deep. It tasted like car exhaust.