Last winter I got into a little bit of trouble. I was working as a freelancer then, still am, but back then I wasn’t doing so well with it. I was a decade out of journalism school and I still hadn’t really made it, so to speak. I had yet to accept that I was just another muckraking hack in a world that already had way too many of us. I couldn’t find work. I was living near Chinatown in downtown Portland in a rattrap that rented rooms by the week. It goes without saying that I ran out of money. After exhausting my line of credit at the local pawnshop, I borrowed a medium chunk of change from a fast-talking fellow in nice shoes named Leon.
In retrospect, this was not one of my better ideas. At the time, though, it looked like my options were Leon or hanging out at the Portland Rescue Mission with the rest of the bums.
I was about a month late on my interest payments when someone came knocking on my door about it. I’m no coward, but when I opened the door I nearly turned tail and jumped out the window. Standing there was the biggest guy I’d ever seen. At least a foot taller than me, with muscles tensed under his skin like steel cables. He looked down at me with eyes like chips of broken glass and I thought, “That’s it. Say goodbye to your kneecaps, buddy. That’s all she wrote.”
But then this little piping voice said, “Hello, my name is Rivka Balshemennikov.” No way it came from the big guy. I looked down. In front of the big guy was a girl in a grey wool suit jacket that hung to her knees. She held out her hand to me.
I took her hand and she shook it thoroughly while she looked me hard in the face. The girl had sharp black eyes that bored straight to the back of my head.
“I’m Frank,” I said.
“Good,” said the girl, dropping my hand. “Then you are the guy we are looking for. May we come in?”
“Sure,” I said. I threw out my hands so she could see I didn’t have anything on me and backed away from the door. The girl stepped into the room, followed by the giant. The guy quietly shut the door behind them.
“Like I said, I’m Rivka. This is my colleague, Serhiy. We are here about your debt.”
“Serge?” I said, walking over to the filthy card table where I kept my liquor.
“Serhiy, Serge,” said the big guy. “What does it matter to me?” He spoke clear enough, but with a thick Slavic accent that made him swallow all his vowels.
“I’m going to have a drink. Can I have a drink?” I reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey on the card table. The girl nodded and kept her black eyes fixed on me as I poured a shot.
“You guys want some?” I asked.
“What do you have?” said Rivka.
“Just the whiskey.”
Serhiy/Serge made a face and shook his head.
“I’ll have some,” said the girl. Despite the foreign name, she didn’t have an accent. There was still something kind of weird about the way she spoke, though. I thought maybe she was from the east coast.
I handed her the shot and she took it in two neat swallows. She handed the empty glass back to me. I poured myself a double and drank it quickly.
“I should tell you guys now, I don’t have the money,” I said.
Rivka blinked slowly at me. She ran her hand back through the mess of dark hair curling back from her head. Her fingers caught and she kept them there for a few seconds before taking them out again.
“Can you get the money?” she asked. She flicked her eyes around the room. One corner of her thin red lips curled back over her teeth as she took in the state of my apartment.
“Not until I get another gig. I already pawned everything worth pawning. So unless you guys take food stamps, we’re out of luck.”
The girl’s eyes flicked back to me. She didn’t blink for a while. “I believe you,” she said. “Do you believe him, Serge?”
The big guy stretched and rolled his neck on his shoulders. His joints popped and I imagined dinosaur-sized vertebrae clacking together.
“Yeah,” he said. “This place is a hole of shit.”
“A shit hole,” corrected the girl.
“That’s what I said.”
Rivka turned to me and raised her hands in a beseeching way. “But we are supposed to get the money today.
“I don’t have it.”
“Then we have a problem,” said the girl. Her skin was the color of old newspaper and there were dark smudges under her eyes. Rivka was maybe in her early twenties, but the way she clenched her jaw made her look older.
“We would rather not hurt you,” she said. “What’s the point in that? So I will call Leon and see what we can work out.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a cheap silver cell phone.
Serge cleared his throat. “Leon doesn’t like cell phones,” he said.
“Right,” said the girl. She flipped the phone shut and stuck it back in her pocket. “Either of you guys have a quarter?” I sifted through my pockets of my ratty sports coat and found a quarter among the shredded bus passes and lint fluff. The Slav reached into his jeans and then held out a single silver disc in the center of his enormous palm. Rivka took both quarters and pounded off down the stairs. The heavy boots she was wearing made her sound like a goddamn elephant. I don’t know how I didn’t hear her coming up.
The big guy pulled out one of the metal folding chairs by the card table and sat down in it. He made it look like a Fischer-Price toy.
“Are you thinking of flying coop?” he asked me. “You better not.”
To show my good intentions, I pulled out the other chair and sat down across from him. I held the edges of my seat with my hands to keep my fingers from drumming all over the place. I looked at the guy and he looked at me. He was wearing pale blue Levis and a plain white t-shirt. Both of them looked just a bit too small. He also had on an enormous pair of grey hi-top canvas sneakers. Those seemed to fit. Serge had short, reddish kind of hair that stuck up from his head like a bottlebrush. His face made me think about boxers, but he looked like someone who’d never really been hit in the face. Hell, who could reach it?
I wondered how those gears in his thick skull were moving. To him I probably looked like just another weasel-faced alkie who needed a good pop in the mouth.
Then the guy said, “What did you think of her?”
“Which her?” I said.
The Slav rolled his eyes. “Which her?” he parroted back at me. “The girl, idiot.”
“Oh,” I said. “The little one? Rivka, right?”
When he heard that name the guy collapsed in his chair. Serge put his giant head in his giant hands. “I suffer terrible with love for her. I am eaten by it,” he said. I just stared at him with my mouth hanging open like a moron. I hadn’t dealt with a whole lot of real thugs in my life, but I was pretty sure this guy wasn’t acting professional. I realized that this was my moment, if I was going to have a moment. I could smash the half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey over the guy’s head and make a break for it. After that instant, though, everything looked black. I couldn’t think what would happen past that. Better to sit tight. The big guy raised his head to look at me and the moment passed. “I know what you think. You think, ’she is not so pretty’, right?”
“Well. She’s all right,” I said.
Serge nodded solemnly. He tapped the side of his solid temple with an enormous finger. “But she is smart smart. She reads books all the time.”
“A brainy broad, huh?”
The Slav leaned back in his chair. The metal joints creaked. “You read books?” he asked.
“Sometimes. Mostly just newspapers.”
“Mostly I read comic books. But sometimes books. I think what I have is the ‘court love’.”
“You’re like a knight?”
“Yes,” said Serge. He beamed at me. He had proportionately giant white teeth. “I am like a knight.”
“Huh. Did they have knights in Russia?”
The guy’s eyebrows contracted. “What do you mean?”
“Well, you’re a Russkie, right?”
The guy glared at me. Then he turned in his seat, scratching the chair against the floor until he was sitting with his back to me. He started muttering to himself in something that wasn’t English.
“Jeez,” I said. “Ex-cuse me.”
The door opened and Rivka came back. She looked from me to Serge, who hadn’t looked up from his seat.
“Aw, what did you do?” she said.
“I didn’t do anything. I was just making conversation.”
“Did you call him a Russian?”
“I might’ve,” I said.
The girl sighed through closed teeth. “He hates that. He’s moody all today and then you go and do that. You are lucky that you didn’t get bopped.” The girl whistled like a kettle, but the guy didn’t move. “Serhiy, shto slychilos?” called Rivka.
The big guy muttered something back at her. “What did he say?” I asked.
“How should I know?” said the girl. “He’s speaking Ukrainian.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. “You’ll have to excuse me. I am going to shout at him a little.”
The girl took a breath and lowered her voice. “That’s how it is going to be, huh? You’re going to talk like that all day? I can do that too, you know. How about I shout at you in Lithuanian all day? How about that for a fun time?”
The big guy didn’t move, but stopped muttering. “Atkaklus vyras!” shouted Rivka, stomping her heavy boots on the floor.
“Hey,” I said. “I have neighbors, you know.” Then I thought that maybe my neighbors might call the cops. That would get me off the hook for a while, at least. I shut my mouth.
The girl kept spitting Baltic language at her colleague. “Okay,” said Serge, raising his hands like he wanted to defend himself. “Okay. Just stop it, okay?” The big guy stood up and crossed the room in a few giant steps. He looked down at Rivka. “I hate it when I can’t understand you. You could be saying terrible things about me.” I swear, his broken glass eyes were tearing up.
“I didn’t say anything that terrible about you,” said the girl apologetically. She reached out and hooked her hand around one of his massive forefingers. Serge’s face switched on like a naked light bulb.
“This is all really sweet,” I said, “But I believe we were discussing my financial situation?”
The girl looked at me and raised her eyebrows halfway up her forehead, like she’d forgotten I was there. “Oh. Yeah,” she said. She let go of Serge.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, Frank, I talked to Leon,” said Rivka. She stuck her hands deep into the pockets of her coat.
“And?” I said.
“We have another thing to do today. You are going to come with us and be an extra set of hands. You do this, and Leon ignores your tardiness and lets you pay back the loan, no interest, when you get the money.”
I agreed, because it didn’t sound like I had any other choices. We left my apartment building and went out to the car they had parked on the street.
The car was a little swamp green 80s hatchback. Serge folded himself into the driver’s seat and hunched over the wheel so that his head didn’t hit the ceiling. Rivka got into the passenger seat and I sat in the back. We took off towards north Portland and I looked through the junk scattered over the back seats. A book with blocky Cyrillic text on the cover, empty packages of sunflower seeds and Red Vines, Uncanny X-men issue number five hundred sixty-five.
While we were driving and moving further out of the main city, I thought about how this could all be an elaborate ruse to get me to leave my apartment without kicking up a fuss. For all I knew they were driving me out in the woods to throttle me and wrap my body up in plastic. There wasn’t anything in the back I could use to defend myself with. The worst I could do was threaten to tear up the comic book.
The two people in front started talking to each other like I wasn’t there. “I miss just delivering packages,” said Rivka.
“This is better,” said Serge. “You make more money and are less bored. You don’t have to paint houses anymore.”
“I miss painting houses. I miss being bored.”
“You miss a lot of things,” said Serge.
“It’s hard to catch a break in this country, huh?” I added. I thought that maybe by joining in the conversation I could make them feel bad if they were planning on killing me.
The girl twisted around in her seat. “Pshhhh,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“You say that because you haven’t lived anywhere else. This is a good place to live. My parents were refuseniks for years and years and then they come to Brooklyn so that I could be born on solid American soil.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “The American dream. You know that’s a myth, right? It’s a dream that doesn’t come true. You’re young now but you’ll figure it out.”
But Rivka just went right on. “A hundred years ago,” she said, “Serge would have gutted me with a bayonet.”
“I would not have,” said Serge.
“You don’t know. You probably would have. But here, today, we are colleagues and excellent friends. All things are possible.”
Something about the way she said that all things were possible made me feel a little less nervous. Maybe she was right. It was possible that Rivka and Serge were going to bash my head in with a rock, but maybe instead we’d get along great and become super good buddies. We’d meet up for drinks and go to potlucks and they’d give me the scoop on the Portland low life and we’d all talk about how great it was that the Cold War was over and we could all hang out now.
The hatchback pulled up to a seedy little split level house set far back from the road and half-hidden by big pine trees. Rivka hopped out and took something out from the trunk. When she walked back around to the front of the car she had a nylon backpack on and was carrying a crowbar across her shoulders. I started worrying about my brains getting smashed out again.
I got out of the car and considered making a break for the trees. Serge brought one massive hand down on top my head and held it there with his fingers digging into my forehead.
“Hey,” he said. “You look like maybe you are thinking of going somewhere. Are you thinking of going somewhere.?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. He took his hand off my head and patted me on the shoulder. Serge gave me a cold, fixed smile. I think he was still mad that I called him a Russkie. Rivka paced in front of the house, still holding the crowbar.
“You’re sure nobody’s home?” she said.
Serge checked his watch. “Nobody’s home. We have an hour or maybe two.”
“Anyone can smash a window. I think instead we go see if one of the windows on the second floor is unlocked. It is more surprising that way.”
Serge raised his arms over his head and made a throwing gesture. I had no idea what it meant. “Yeah,” said Rivka.
“So are we robbing this place or what?” I said.
“We are not robbing anybody,” said Rivka. She pretty much shot daggers out of those black eyes of hers.
“Do we look like robbers?” said Serge.
“Breaking and entering is an entirely different thing than robbing,” said Rivka.
“Okay,” I said. “Sorry. What am I supposed to do?”
“We don’t need you for anything until we get inside. Calm down,” said Rivka. We walked over to the back of the house. Serge crouched down by the wall and put his hands flat on the ground, palms up. Rivka stood in front of him, facing the wall, and stepped back onto his hands. She held the crowbar between her chin and her clavicle. The big guy closed his hands around the soles of her boots and slowly started to lift her up over his head. Rivka put both hands on the side of the wall and slowly walked them up as she was lifted higher.
“Damn,” I said, “You guys escape from a circus?”
“Be quiet,” said Serge. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth and lit up. The nicotine helped calm me down. If they were planning on killing me they probably would have done it by now. Eventually Rivka was head level with the window. She pushed at it with her hands. It didn’t budge and she shook her head. They repeated this for the other windows on the second floor until they found one that gave. Rivka pried it open with the crowbar without splintering the sill.
“Hup,” she said, putting her hands on the sill. Serge flexed his arms and pretty much tossed her through the window. Rivka vaulted through and I heard her land somewhere inside.
She stuck her head out the window and gave a thumbs up.
“Ha ha,” said Serge. “We are dynamic duo, huh?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I will go around front and open the door,” said Rivka out the window. She withdrew from the window.
“Be careful,” said Serge.
Rivka put her head back out the window. “What do you mean? You said no one’s home.”
“No one should be home,” said Serge. “But you can still be careful. Keep the crowbar out.”
Rivka disappeared again and Serge and I headed around to the front of the house. After a while the deadbolts rattled and Rivka opened the door. She was still holding the crowbar. She looked me up and down. “You probably want to put out that cigarette,” she said. I did.
We stepped inside and my nose was immediately walloped by a strong chemical funk. Rivka unzipped her backpack and handed out paper particulate filters and plastic safety goggles. I put mine on and I’ll admit that the safety goggles made me feel a little more safe. With the goggles and the masks on, Rivka and Serge looked like parodies of scientists. They gave me the creeps.
“Let’s get to work,” said Rivka. We walked into the kitchen.
It was a meth lab. Not even what I would think of as a nice meth lab. The place was filthy and disorganized. Rubber tubing, glass coffee pots, and white powder everywhere. Glass bottles and scales all jumbled together on the kitchen table. What a mess. It was even worse than my apartment.
Rivka didn’t say anything. She just swung the crow bar in a perfect arc and smashed through a row of glass and rubber tubing. Serge picked up the entire kitchen table and threw it against the wall. Plaster, wood, and glass broke and rained down onto the sticky linoleum floor. Then he handed me a chair. “Get to work,” he said.
So I started breaking things. I ground the whole mess under the chair and then smashed the chair into the stove until the chair broke and the electric burners were bent off. I kept smashing things with the pieces of the broken chair. Eventually everything that could have been smashed up was smashed up and lying on the floor. The chemical smell made my eyes water through the goggles.
We walked back outside and took off the protective gear. “You can have a cigarette now, if you want,” said Rivka. She reached into her pockets and pulled out a pack of something imported and unfiltered. I got out my own smokes and lit up. We smoked and looked at the pine trees and the road.
“So, what’d we do that for?” I asked.
Serge stuck his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans. He wasn’t smoking. Instead he just looked off down the road, squinting his eyes like he was staring into the sun. “They didn’t listen,” he said.
We were driving back to my place when Rivka said, “You know, I’m kind of hungry.”
“Of course you are. You were swinging that crowbar super good, Rivka. Maybe we should stop for food,” said Serge.
Rivka turned around in her seat. “Do you mind if we stop for food? We’ll drop you home afterward.”
“I could go for some dinner,” I said. “Maybe some burgers. You guys like burgers?”
“Yes,” Rivka, “But since we have the car let’s go somewhere good.”
“What is that place?” said Serge. He snapped his fingers as he tried to come up with a name. “That place with the good milkshakes?”
“Burgerville,” I said.
We went to Burgerville. Serge ordered two cheeseburger meals and a large chocolate milkshake. Rivka got single cheeseburger meal. I ended up getting a chicken sandwich. We sat in a red vinyl booth, them on one side, me on the other. Rivka took small bites of burger between small bites of fries, alternating between the two. Serge ate steadily and methodically. He finished one meal and then started on the second one. Neither of them said anything.
“You know,” I said, “One time I wrote an article about the way fast food places size things.”
“Yeah?” said Rivka.
“Well, you remember how you used to be able to super size things?”
“Yes,” said Serge. He turned to Rivka. “We saw a documentary with that guy, right?”
“The guy who ate all that terrible food,” said Rivka.
“And he threw up I the parking lot the one time,” said Serge. Both of them chuckled over their fries.
“Well,” I said, “So after they got rid of the super size option, some people thought it was kind of stupid. People who want to eat a lot will just order two of the smaller portions instead, right?”
“You would think so,” said Rivka, “But the way you are telling this story makes me think that is not what happened.”
“Exactly,” I said. “The same person who orders a super size fries doesn’t order two medium fries. They’re comfortable getting a single bucket of fries, but they’re worried that if they order two smaller buckets they’ll look like a pig. Isn’t that weird?”
“I always order two meals,” said Serge. He finished his second burger and started working on the fries.
“Yeah,” I said. “But you’re, like, seven feet tall. No one’s going to judge you for ordering two meals.”
Serge shrugged and took a long slurp of his milkshake. “Maybe they do. Why should I care? My bucket of fries is none of their business.”
“You’re pretty goddamn stoic, Serge,” I said. The big guy nodded and smiled.
“Thank you,” he said.
They dropped me off right in front of my apartment building, just like they said they would. I felt like I had handled myself pretty well that afternoon. No one had hit me in the face and all my joints were still intact. Neither of them got out of the car to see me inside, but Rivka rolled down her window and stuck her head out of the door. Serge kept his eyes fixed on her like he was worried about her falling out.
“Hey newsman,” said Rivka, “You don’t write about this, okay?” She winked and snapped her fingers so that they ended up pointed straight at me. It was a move right out of Happy Days, but it made her hands look like loaded guns.
“Okay,” I said as the car started to pull away from the curb, “I won’t.”
———-
I started a new “draft” category for things I consider particularly unfinished. It makes me more comfortable with posting this process online. In the future, I’m going to complicate a scene or two in here. Right now it’s a little anticlimactic.
Not all the stories in my thesis collection are narrated by Rivka (so far it looks like it will be two out of nine or ten), but it looks like she’s going to be somehow present in every one. You hear her over the telephone. She’s sitting in the background of someone else’s conversation. Girl gets around.
Here’s a story. I recently made lunch with someone who had probably spent more time reading my stories than actually interacting with me. While I was heating olive oil in a pan, I put on the mellow indie pop I usually listen to while cooking. He was surprised I didn’t choose The Dead Kennedys. “It’s weird,” he said, “But I guess I associated with you with your protagonist.”
I kind of laughed, but in the nervous sort of way I do when I get compared to fictional characters. In early 2007, someone told me that I looked like a character in a book.
When people read my fiction and ask me what character is me, I invariably answer, “All of them.” That’s really the truth of it.
I am currently working on a story called “Champ”, which is narrated by Elena Beck, who is also the narrator of “Win”. “Win” has not yet appeared here because I feel that it still needs some major work before I can figure out where it hangs in the collection. “Champ” is about winter claustrophobia, Chernobyl, and the desire to see impossible things. Writing it involves me staring at maps a lot and thinking about empty cities.
In other news, I visited The Church of Elvis late last night in downtown Portland. While I was there, a robot told me about my past lives. Unfortunately, I don’t remember much of what was said except that at one point I was “a meteor flying high”. I’ll think about that while I watch the Leonid shower tomorrow night.
I went to a Dirty Projectors concert last night. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. I left feeling like somebody had trepanned me with a golden drill. In a good way. Those girls, yelping like machines!
I often have a musical loop of some sort feeding through my ears while I’m writing. Usually an entire album set to repeat. I don’t know if the music colors the writing, or if I select the music to reflect the story’s mood. Maybe I should try experimenting with it and see what happens.
I’ve become very interested in Simon Evans over the last few days. I’m fascinated by how he subjectively organizes the world through lists, graphs, catalogs, and diagrams. I really like Symptoms of Loneliness. Also a piece in which he illustrates the process of a love affair via bar graph. I want to steal titles from him.
I didn’t do any work at all last night, so I’ll be scrambling to catch up until Thursday. But I do have a draft of “Gainful Employment” sitting on my hard drive that I’ll publish here in the near future. Pinky swear.
I’ve been unusually together lately. In addition to writing, writing, writing, I’ve been sleeping, cooking, reading, and skiing in place at the gym. Occasionally I go out and about and get lost. Getting lost is good for the writing, I think. I even updated my long neglected cooking blog, Knives Out.
I have two half-completed drafts that I’m working on right now. Both are in the first person and involve male protagonists. Both are linked closely to the other stories I’ve written this semester. This allows me to continue working with characters and locations I’m fond of while branching out in voice. It’s fun. I’m so excited about things that I scribble longhand in a notebook while I’m away from my computer. My wrist cramps up. It’s pretty terrible.
One draft is titled “Satellites”. It’s a road story that finally allows me to explore the St. Christopher / Laika connection I’ve thought about for a while. You’ll have to trust me when I say it makes sense in context.
The other story is tentatively titled “Gainful Employment”. It’s another unreal crime story that brings back the dynamic duo of Serhiy/Serge Klychko and Rivka Balshemennikov. It involves a lot of language tension and language humor and the pitfalls of communication. I hope it will be as funny to other people as it is to me.
I should have a draft of one or the other done by Monday. I’m not quite sure which one to focus on, though. So if you have a preference about which one you’d like to see first, dear reader, let me know and I’ll try to oblige you.
Also, Happy Halloween! Don’t forget to go out and get in trouble.
The Kurd is a Muslim, and he kills the goat in the proper way. He holds its head back and opens its throat with a long knife. Blood spurts between his fingers and flows down the goat’s white chest. The knife is so sharp and the Kurd is so fast that the animal doesn’t have time to know it has been cut. It dies very quiet.
Afterward we hang the goat from a tree and peel off its skin and fat in long sheets. I help, because I know how it works. We tie off its intestines and spill the offal onto a plastic tarp. The Kurd portions the goat with a cleaver and puts it on the grill. Fat renders, drips onto the coals, and burns up in little flares.
It’s the fourth of July and we’re having a barbeque.
I’ve been in Portland for nearly a year. This is my first independence day here.
The Kurd’s name is Ahmede and he’s a friend of Serge’s, the guy who invited me to the barbeque in the first place. I have never met the Kurd before, even though all three of us sometimes work for the same boss, whose name is Leon. I know what me and Serge do for Leon, but I don’t know what Ahmede does. I have a few not-so-nice ideas.
The Kurd himself is nice, though. He is small, dark man with large white teeth. He lives in a vinyl-sided tract home with a yard and a fence around it. He has a pleasant fat wife and two or three little daughters who run around the yard with a big mutt dog. A few of Ahmede’s Vietnamese neighbors are at the barbeque and they chatter to each other in a language that flies in one of my ears and out the other. Everyone scoops goat meat and noodles and potato salad onto paper plates and eats standing up.
I eat the burnt edges of the goat meat and compliment the wife on her home and the potato salad. She is not really listening to me, but instead staring up at Serge. People stare at Serge a lot. He is used to it.
“Huh. Look at you,” says Ahmede’s wife, “What did they feed you?”
“Potatoes and radiation,” says Serge with a straight face.
“And you?” she says, swinging her head around towards me. “You look stunted.”
“Chicken fat and second-hand smoke,” I say.
“Huh,” says the woman again. She puts the base of her palm on her broad hips. “Okay then.” She turns to yell at her daughters, who are throwing pebbles at the chain-link fence.
Serge and I head over to Ahmede. The Kurd is fussing over the grill and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette.
“Ahmede,” says Serge. “This is Rivka. You’ve probably seen her around Leon’s office before.”
Ahmede looks me up and down. “Yeah. I’ve seen you around.”
“I haven’t seen you,” I say. The Kurd laughs and his broad white teeth shine in his face.
“You’re not supposed to,” he says.
“Well,” I say, “It’s good to meet you now.” I hold out my hand and the Kurd gives it two hard pumps.
“Where are you from?” he asks me.
Serge wags an enormous finger in the Kurd’s face. “Rivka doesn’t like to talk about things like that. She’s like you.” He stops waving his finger and looks into the coals of the grill. “I don’t understand it. Maybe it is because I had a happy childhood.”
“Serge, when you were a kid you were nearly killed by nuclear fallout,” I say.
“That doesn’t mean I wasn’t happy,” says Serge. He fixes me with his pale calm eyes. “Ahmede is from Turkey, but he doesn’t like to talk about it,” he says like it means something. Ahmede makes a noise in the back of his throat.
“Who cares?” says the Kurd. “We’re in America now. You two will stay for the fireworks?”
“Not today,” I say. “We’re taking a trip to the mountains after lunch. Serge borrowed a car.”
The Kurd squints at me and spits the end of his cigarette onto the coals of the grill. “Why for?”
“Some people saw a Bigfoot on Mt. Hood. After this we are going to look for him,” says Serge.
“You are an atheist but you believe in Bigfoot. It will be a waste of an afternoon,” says Ahmede. He flips goat meat on the grill.
“It is a science! Cryptozoology.”
“You do this too?” asks the Kurd, turning to me. I shrug.
“Rivka knows that there are things in the world we cannot see. She once was in love with an invisible man,” says Serge.
“A ghost?” says Ahmade. He looks at me closely and his eyebrows pull close together.
“No, just invisible,” I say. “He wore bandages when he went out, as if he had been burned in an accident. But really he was invisible.”
“How does something like that happen to a man?” asked the Kurd.
I shrugged. again “I don’t know. There really was an accident, I think. Bad science.”
“We believe in science,” says Serge.
“That’s the problem with you socialists. You are without God, so you are always looking for something else.”
“We are not socialists,” says Serge, “We have never been socialists.”
“I was raised on capitalism,” I say.
“Yes, Rivka’s too young. Besides, she was born in America.” Serge puts one massive arm across my shoulders. I feel myself sink a little into the soft ground under the weight.
Ahmade thinks that Serge is my boyfriend and I let him think that. So far we are just friends and sometime co-workers. Like me, Serge has two jobs. One is legitimate and the other not so much. At night he works as a bouncer and during the day he runs errands for Leon. I paint the insides of houses and sometimes I run errands for Leon, too. Serge and I run different kinds of errands.
I met Serge because we were running the same errand.
Last November the sky was spitting rain all the time and I was still riding a bike everywhere. I bought a clear plastic poncho to keep some of the rain off me. The plastic hood made me feel like I was in a fishbowl. My boots were made for trenches and they did okay in the rain, but my jeans soaked through and leaked into my socks.
I biked over to Leon’s office and locked my bike in front of the rectangular building. Leon had a real office. No elevator, I had to pull myself up three flights of stairs, but it was still a real office. There were no black letters on the frosted glass of the office door, just dark dots where the old name had been scraped off. I headed into the front room of the office. There wasn’t much in the little front room besides a few metal folding chairs. An enormous man sat in one of the folding chairs, reading a comic book. He looked up over the top of the bright pages.
“Leon called me,” I said. The big man nodded.
I walked past him and into Leon’s office. Leon was sitting behind his broad wooden desk, adding something up on a calculator. He was wearing a button-down shirt and a soft grey scarf around his neck. Leon had a shaved head and a face like a hawk.
“You called me,” I said. My toes squished in my boots.
Leon stood up behind his desk and spread his arms. “Rivka! Clever little Rivka! How are you this fine afternoon?”
I sneezed and water jumped off my plastic coat and fell onto the carpet. “You’re going to ask me to do something I don’t want to do,” I said.
“Pretty little Rivka,” continued Leon.
“Now you’ve overplayed it. I know it’s going to be something I don’t want to do. Don’t drag it out.”
Leon sat back behind his desk and rubbed his palm over his black eyebrows. He did quite well for himself because there are not many people in Portland with access to a good supply of cocaine.
Leon wrote an address on a sticky note and held it across the desk to me. “This fellow owes me some money, Rivka. I want you to go talk to him.”
I looked at the piece of paper. “I deliver packages, Leon. And when I do that I don’t even want to know what’s in the packages. I don’t want to talk to this guy. You are always trying to promote me when I don’t want to be promoted.”
“Rivka,” said Leon, “I require a woman’s touch in this matter. You’re smart, you can handle it.”
“I don’t do the kind of talking you’re asking me to do.”
Leon pulled his hand over his face again. “Rivka, you misunderstand. I’m a businessman. I like to do business like a civilized person. Does the boss car salesman break the little car salesman’s legs when he makes a mistake? No, he doesn’t.”
“Huh,” I said.
“I send a big guy, everyone gets defensive. But if I send a sweet little thing like you, I think maybe people will be more talkative”
I made my least sweet face. I pulled my thin lips back and bared all my crooked teeth.
“Don’t do that,” said Leon. I stopped.
“Besides,” said Leon, “I’ll send Serge with you. You’re from the same country, right? You can talk to each other.”
I didn’t bother to say anything about that.
It turned out that Serge was the guy in the front room. He was probably the biggest guy that I’d ever seen in real life. Maybe seven feet tall, no kidding, which put him about two feet over me. He had a healthy pink Cossack face and one of those short, ex-Soviet Bloc haircuts. His hair was somewhere in between red and blonde, like a sunny carrot. He was almost always smiling.
Serge and I stood outside of Leon’s office and looked at my bike. The bike wasn’t going to work. If he clung to the back of it I wouldn’t be able to move forward one inch. Even if he pedaled, the bike was too small for him. It would probably be crushed. Neither of us wanted to take the bus. So we walked. We spoke in Russian for a few lines, then switched to English.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Around,” I said.
“You speak English like a foreigner, and you speak Russian like a Jew.”
“Well, you speak Russian like a Ukrainian,” I said.
“Aha,” said Serge, “That is because I am a Ukrainian. But you still do not answer my question.”
“I speak the way I always have,” I said. “I was born in the states. I grew up in Brighton Beach. My parents are from Vilna, in Lithuania. They are Jews.”
“So you are a Jew,” said Serge. I was suspicious of him, but he didn’t say it meanly.
“I am a Jew because my mother is a Jew. I don’t believe in God.”
“So you are nothing,” said Serge. Again, he said it without bad intent. He was just commenting. “It’s okay, I don’t believe in God either.” He raised his t-shirt and scratched at an itch in his side while we walked. There were so many muscles there that he looked armor-plated. “You don’t like talking about where you are from,” he said.
“No,” I said.
“That’s also okay,” said Serge. “I don’t like where I’m from. That’s why I’m here.”
We walked quietly for a few blocks. I had to take two steps for every one of his. “Do you like cryptozoology?” asked Serge, but we were already at the place.
The place was a rotting wooden house with a big front porch. We went up the steps and the wood creaked under Serge’s feet.
“You need me, you whistle. You know how to whistle?” Serge made a bird noise through his teeth.
I tried to imitate him, but instead made a noise like a broken kettle.
Serge scratched at the ginger stubble on his chin. “Huh. How about you just shout instead?”
I nodded and went into the house. The man in the house was a scraggly white American. He was sitting at a plastic table in a kitchen that didn’t look like it had been used to cook food for a long time.
“Who are you?” asked the man. “Where’s Leon?”
I sat down across from him. “Hello,” I said, keeping my voice polite and holding out my hand, “I’m Rivka Balshemennikov.”
The man didn’t take my hand. He spat onto the table. “I’m supposed to meet with Leon.”
I looked at the place on the table where the man had spat. It was a disgusting thing to do, but it was his table and he could do what he liked with it. If it had been my table he spat on this would have been a different story.
“Leon sent me,” I continued, “So you can talk to me. Okay?”
The man glared at me. While he was grinding his teeth, I reached into the pocket of my coat and pulled out a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. I lit one and stuck it in the corner of my mouth. I did this all very coolly, but really I was trying to calm myself down. The guy was a real jerk.
“You owe Leon some money,” I said.
“Yeah, and I told him that I’d get to him. I’m just getting it to him in my own damn time.”
“That’s not how this works,” I said. “You get the money to Leon on Leon’s time.”
The man’s eyes rolled in his head. He pushed himself back from the table and his chair screeched against the linoleum. “Listen,” he said, “You go and tell Leon that I didn’t come here to get lectured by some dime store runt. He’ll get the money when he gets it.”
In my head an image played very fast and disappeared. In the image, I stood up, picked up my chair, and bashed it over the man’s head. I did not do this. “Dear sir,” I said so quietly that the man shut up. I spoke through my teeth so that he would know I did not think he was dear or a sir. “You do not understand your situation. I am trying to help you out here. You see, I am the one Leon sends first.” I gestured with my cigarette towards the front porch.
Serge was standing on the porch with his back to us, looking off into the street. His pink fists hung at his sides like Christmas hams.
The man worked his jaw. Then he opened his coat and counted hundred dollar bills out onto the table. “Here’s half of it. I’ll have the other grand by next week.”
“Pleasure doing business with you,” I said and stuffed the bills into my pockets. I backed out of the room and onto the porch, keeping my eyes on him.
Serge, who had been whistling a tune, looked over at me. “You want I should go inside?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“No,” I said. “I got the money. Let’s go.”
As we walked away from the house I kept looking over my shoulder. “You’re nervous,” said Serge.
“I wanted to hit him but I thought he might shoot me,” I said.
“You should have bopped him. Most people, even if they have a gun, they shoot lousy. They miss.”
I shook my head slowly back and forth. Serge looked down at me from his great height. “Or you could have called me in and I would have bopped him for you.” Serge swung one massive fist through the air. “Pow!” he said.
“Well, maybe next time,” I said.
We kept walking. Serge had my bike up over his big shoulders. I looked down at my boots and dragged the soles against the concrete. After a few blocks neon flashed from somewhere above my head and Serge stopped. He put my bike down and jerked his shoulder upward.
“Hey!” said Serge, “Let’s go get a beer. I will buy you one, even. You seem like an unhappy girl.”
We went for a beer. In the bar Serge had told me that he was born in Chernobyl and his real name was Serhiy Georgyevich Klychko. When he was a kid the power plant blew up and they had to evacuate. He was about ten when it happened and he had been sure that it was the end of the world. Since then he has been in a good mood because the world continues to exist. His family lived in Odessa for a while. He moved to the states in the nineties because he was bored in the Ukraine and he liked American comic books and American sneakers.
Serge gestured under the table. His feet were in canvas high-tops the size of boats.
I told Serge why I was an unhappy girl. I told him that a month ago my boyfriend left me and now my heart was broken and I kept thinking backwards all the time.
Serge put his giant hands on either side of my face. His fingers were across my ears so I could hardly hear him. He said something about how love makes everyone think backwards. He told me that I was pretty young and that I would figure it out.
After that we were friends.
When we are done talking to Ahmede we go and sit in the grass by the tree. The remains of the goat are hanging in the tree where the dog can’t get it. It is mostly head and hooves.
Serge has never tried to kiss me, not once. I would say it is because he thinks I’m ugly, but sometimes he looks at me very carefully in a way that makes me think that isn’t it. When he lifts weights in his basement apartment, he likes it when I’m there to watch. He lies on his back and hoists barbells over his head while I read my books. One late night he came to my house very drunk and wouldn’t say a single word to me. He sat on my couch and stared and wept a little until he fell asleep. In the morning I could hear him singing Elvis songs in the shower.
I’m not very sure what I feel about Serge. I do know I like him. I think he is very present in the world. I think that I would be better off if I could be more like him.
Sometimes when Serge can borrow a car we go for long drives out through the tall green trees. I don’t have a license, but when we get far enough out I practice my driving. Once there was a turtle in the middle of the road and Serge stopped the car so we could get out and help it cross. Really, Serge is a gentle man. He is only violent when he is paid to be so.
I live in one bedroom of a little house off Division St. My roommate is a medical student and isn’t home very often. When she passes through the living room she blinks at me like she forgot I live there. I like my room in the little house, so I’ve been there a while. I bought a phonogram from a pawnshop and started storing records in plastic milk crates along the edges of my room. My mattress is on the floor. I could still leave at any time.
For now I live cheaply and quietly. I ride my bike and go to work. I take long walks around town with people I know and sometimes I go out for drinks. I make big pots of lentils on the stove while Jello Biafra yells from my stereo about how he’s looking forward to death. Serge lies on my couch with his eyes closed and his feet hanging over the armrests. He listens very hard.
At the barbeque, we stand up to leave. There is a flap in the tree above us and I raise my chin to look. A crow scrabbles at the goat’s pink skull. It picks out a staring eye with its beak and gulps the jelly down.
I elbow Serge. My elbow is on level with his hip. “Look at that,” I say.
Serge squints his blue eyes at the goat carcass. “There’s a crow,” he says.
“Do you think that’s a good omen, or a bad one?” I say.
Serge thinks. “A good one” he says. “The crow’s happy, isn’t it?” He puts his arm around my waist and slips two fingers down the waistband of my jeans. He rubs my hipbone like it’s good luck.
———-
Were you expecting another Rivka Balshemennikov story? You weren’t? Too bad, you already read it.
This is very much a draft and will probably be entirely restructured in the future. It might need to get split into two different stories. There’s too much dialogue, not enough happenings. I was trying to do a lot of things with this story. People seemed to be very fond of the Rivka narrator, and many readers expressed that they’d like to see more of her. Especially more of her “at work”. So this story is a bit of a response to that. I also wanted to try evolving her voice a little. She’s still not very self-reflective, but she’s a little more aware and able to “think backwards” on things she has done. It made the voice less restrictive to write in, but I’m worried it’s no longer as distinctive. When I edit this, a lot of what I’ll be doing is reading through the story out loud, line by line, and altering vocabulary and phrasing that doesn’t sound right.
Serge was fun to write. I tend to write about clever, barely-there men with soft hands and anguished souls. So I thought I’d try working with a character who’s largely defined by his overbearing physicality. When I was thinking about the way Rivka and Serge would interact in the physical world, I kept thinking about Colossus and Wolverine. And the Fastball Special. A little angry thing and big, serene statue working together. In my mind Serge looks a little like a cross between Peter Stormare and a cartoon character. Of course he reads comics. Of course he makes jokes about radiation. Serge is a Marvel boy. This is the song he sings in the shower.
There was no attempt to make the little crimes in this story realistic. The Wire, this is not. (Though the very unfunny running joke about all ex Soviet Bloc people being mistaken for Russians is a reference to that series. That, and the fact I decided to call my Ukrainian Serge, despite the fact that the Ukrainian version of the name is usually Serhiy.) I think the style I’m going for in this collection is a kind of unrealism. Not quite fantastic or surreal, but slightly pulpy, slightly off in a way that gives the reader the impression that anything might happen. I was reading Isaac Babel’s Red Calvary while I wrote this story, and I think it shows. Right now I’m dissatisfied with the scene in which Rivka acts as Leon’s go-between. It feels too smooth and too easy. I think I’ll have to rough it up a bit.
I talked a little about influences with someone I know last night. He has to be careful what music he listens to, because otherwise he’ll absorb it so thoroughly that everything he composes will sound like someone else. I’m not sure if I consider that a problem with my fiction. I carry my influences on my sleeve, but at the same time I feel like I arrange elements in my stories in a way that’s distinct to me and my strange interests and aesthetics. Nonetheless, I tend to immerse myself in a shifting media sea while I’m writing. Fiction, music, television, history, comic books. I try to throw a bunch of things at myself at once so that nothing really sticks. Instead, I’m just left with a general impression. It’s like I have a hazy memory of the story I have yet to write, and I just need to piece it together.
I’ve got a draft, and now I’ve got to arrange the pieces so that they make a picture.
I’m back from a road trip to Seattle. We left while it was still dark on Saturday morning and I arrived home a little while ago. Driving long distances is good for me. It wakes up my brain and calms my natural restlessness. I’m on break through the rest of the week. I’m looking forward to long walks and people-watching.
But enough about that. I hit a roadblock with “Win” last week, so instead I wrote six pages of another story. I do this sometimes. I’m wrestling with one story when another creeps up behind me and hits me on the back of the head with a blackjack. This story started swishing around my skull as I took my morning shower. I don’t know exactly where it came from, but I kind of like it. Last summer I spent my first 4th of July in Portland. In addition to the usual hot dogs and hamburgers and vegetables, my friends butchered and grilled a whole squid. This story is a little about that. That’s why it is called “The Fourth”. It is also about being a stranger in a strange land, finding other strange strangers against the odds, being a low-level grunt in a larger organization, and learning how to be kind. It plays with certain noirish ideas. (See: “Nova“) Eccentric criminals and crime that’s petty in every sense of the word.
Like “Goodbye, Invisible Man”, this story is coming together very quickly. I should have a draft for you later in the week. I think that what makes me write is more anticipation than reflection. I have to be nervous/excited about the things that are going to happen in the story.
I tend to consume a strange media salad while I’m writing. Some of it is legitimate research, while the rest of it is only vaguely related but somehow inspires the right mood.
If you’re curious, here’s what I’ve been looking at while working on “The Fourth”.
- a moment from David Foster Wallace’s story “Little Expressionless Animals”
- visual representations of the Fastball Special
- Soviet military photos from WWII, including the one above.
- Kosher and Halal methods of animal slaughter
- Guy Davis‘ work on The Zombies That Ate The World
- “You Light Up My Life” scene from Todd Solondz’ Happiness (NSFW)
- certain scenes of The Maltese Falcon
- maps of Portland
- Wikipedia article on the Chernobyl disaster
Filed under: process
Slowly, slowly poisoning myself.
No draft today. “Win” is already 12 pages long and it’s still not done. It’s an interesting but problematic story. I think it might be about too many things. I need to cut it down or expand it significantly. I’m going to try the latter first.
Instead, I thought I’d give you a peep at my working environment. I do most of my creative writing looking much like I do in the above photo. I sit on the floor of my apartment wedged between an upholstered chair and my coffee table. I drink coffee, tea, or chemically caustic diet cola. I make a wan and harried face. It’s actually not a very comfortable position, but it seems to work.
Sometimes I forget how to speak English while I'm here.
I do most of the translation and analysis work for my Russian classes at my official thesis desk, where all of my dictionaries are in easy reach. It’s in the library under a skylight. I’m desk neighbors with my good friend K. Books, tea, Kate Beaton comic about Cossacks, postcard that says “STAY COOL”, liquor that looks like a magic potion. Also, Hypno-Kafka. I might make him a speech bubble that says: “WRITE!”
I had a semi-official workshop for “Goodbye, Invisible Man” today. Undergraduates! They like it! Lots of compliments on the prose and the voice of the narrator. The main thing people wanted was moar of the invisible man himself. Maybe I’ll add more in. Or maybe I’ll write a sequel in which Bartholomew Gone is the protagonist. That could be an intriguing project.
Midterms this week, so I’m probably going to be pretty quiet for the next five days or so. After that I’ve got a week of fall break. I’ll be noisy then.
Pinky out, for the classy kind of groping.
One of the many nice things about WordPress is that it allows me to follow the popular search terms used to find this blog. Most of the time it’s easy to tell that people came here by accident. “Halloween costume”, for example, seems to be a common one.
But here’s the weird thing. Lately, it seems that people are actively looking for the story “Goodbye, Invisible Man“. There are search terms like “invisible man bicycle packages drugs” and “gloria stuart bandages bar” and “the invisible man doesn’t have much of a face when I first meet him”. It’s as if someone else told them about the story and they wanted to go find it. Or they read it, vaguely remembered it, and wanted to find it again.
I find this fantastic and mildly unsettling. “Goodbye, Invisible Man”: the terrible sensation that’s sweeping the nation.
Dear reader, this might be as good a time as any to discuss collaboration and creative cross-pollination.
The doodle above was drawn by my highly talented friend, Sarah J. (She drew it before she actually read the story, hence the cheeriness.) You can read Sarah’s science news portfolio blog thing here. Sarah J. and I like to draw together. I cartoon as a way of fixing fictional people, places, and things in my mind. Sarah J. draws to draw, and she’s much better at it than I am.
Sometimes she draws my concepts. And sometimes her drawings actually change the concepts I thought I had. It’s an amazing process. Working creatively with other human beings gives my mopey muse a swift kick in the ass.
Sometimes people ask me if I’d like to help them write something, usually a short film. The answer is tricky. “I’d love to, but I don’t have the time.” Right now I don’t have time to do much besides attend class, write stories for my thesis, and occasionally get out into Portland proper to have a beer.
That doesn’t mean I’m anti-collaboration, though. Do you want to make a short film based on one of my existing stories? Draw a comic book? Write a song? Wonderful. Just ask me about it first. I’ll probably say yes as long as you agree to credit me and send me a copy of your finished product.
There’s a little Creative Commons license in the sidebar of this blog. It means you can copy and distribute any of my existing works as much as you want, as long as you don’t alter it and you make sure to give me credit. Including my name is perfect, and additionally including a link back to this site is even better. You want to paper a bathroom with pages from “Nova“? Go right ahead. You want to make little booklets of “Goodbye, Invisible Man” and distribute them to friends and jilted lovers? I think they’d make lovely Christmas gifts. You don’t have to ask me before embarking on any sort of distribution project, but I’d love to see what you end up doing with it. So feel free to drop me a line.
You can contact me through this site, or at a.werner.writes@gmail.com. And not just about collaborations. Give me private feedback. Ask me what my favorite animal is. It’s really up to you.
No draft this week, because “Win” just keeps getting longer and longer. I’ll be working, working. Maybe I’ll post the opening page to whet your appetite. Though at this point it’s going to be hard to live up to “Goodbye, Invisible Man”.
Filed under: non-fiction
Filed under: short fiction
The alarm went off at 7:30. I didn’t move. I knew that if I pretended to be asleep my bedmate would get up and start making the coffee. A few seconds later Greg yawned in my ear. His long fuzzy arm extricated itself from my hips and shot forward to turn off the alarm. I felt his weight lift from the mattress; I heard the rustle of fabric as he dressed.
When he had gone into the kitchen I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the pale mottled surface of the ceiling. It was nearly summer and I could already feel the heat beating at me through the window. Soon, I thought, it will have been two years. It will have been two years since I gave up and skulked back here.
I stared up at the ceiling for another five minutes, searching myself for regret. I was familiar with the feeling. It used to sit cold and heavy behind my ribcage like a lead canary. I probed the boney area between my breasts with the tips of my fingers, testing for a sensation of weight. I didn’t find it.
After college I had spent a few years in western Massachusetts, where I met Greg. Massachusetts hadn’t been good for me. I languished, drank, consoled myself with firearms and self-publishing. Two years ago I gave up and fled back to Austin, Texas and its soothing dry heat. I brought Greg with me.
I got up out of bed and wrapped myself in a silk kimono with a ragged hem before heading into the kitchen. Greg sat hunched over our small linoleum kitchen table, eating wheat toast and drinking black coffee. Between bites he sorted through the mail. I poured myself a mug of coffee and sat across from him.
“Anything for me, sweetheart?” I had slipped back into a subtle drawl after returning to my home state. My voice was warmer and rounder than it had been when I intentionally tamped it down. The “sweetheart”, though, still sounded fictional. I pronounced it clipped short and low in my throat, like a detective in a black and white film.
I was improving, though. For a while it had been very difficult for me to refer to my boyfriend by anything other than his given name. I had only recently graduated to terms of endearment.
Greg munched his toast and slid a single envelope across the table towards me.
I looked at the return address. The letter was from Ari Engelhart.
“There’s no possible way,” I said. I tore it open.
Greg watched me across the table with his usual dark-eyed mildness. Since he had started working for the Texas public education system he had started trimming his thick beard close to his face. It made him look cleaner and older.
I read the letter once, then read it again. My whole frame rattled with excitement. I put the edge of the letter to my lips and nibbled it, tasting for veracity.
“What does it say?” asked Greg.
I smiled so hard my head split wide open. “Ari fucking Engelhart has challenged me to a boxing match.”
-
For the past year I’d been working as a critic for the Austin Chronicle. They paid me next to nothing, but I was still giddy as a schoolgirl that they’d given me the job. I had sent them a copy of Townie, a stapled-together rag of a zine that I’d fiddled with back in Massachusetts. The editor had actually liked it, which was better feedback than I’d ever gotten from Townie’s 15 regular readers during its heyday.
Greg had found work as an art teacher at one of the local middle schools. It was difficult, he said, because middle schoolers were the most noxious segment of the human population and prone to paint fights, but he still preferred it to his former job in Massachusetts, where he had worked as a cashier at a convenience store. He also liked being able to introduce himself by saying, “I’m an artist. And a teacher.” It made him feel especially professional.
We had a little money, enough to rent a tiny ranch house in an unfashionable neighborhood off the tail end of the Drag. We had bone-dry native scrub plants growing in our front lawn. Our next-door neighbor raised half and quarter breed wolf-dogs in her spare time. The wolf-dogs sometimes howled late into the night, but Greg and I agreed that there were worse places to live.
-
One of the things I wrote about for the Chronicle was Ari Engelhart. I especially wrote about Ari Engelhart. My systematic deconstruction of his body of work had quickly become my signature bit. Ari Engelhart was a hack. He was the king of the hacks. His paperback novels came out biannually. There were already 17 of them and a new one was always in the works. I often struggled to convey the feel of an Engelhart novel to those who had been lucky enough to have never come in contact with one. It was if he had heard about books, but had never actually taken the time to read one. The fractured madness of his nonsensical plot twists, stilted dialogue, and purple prose had earned him a small, sarcastic cult following. The critical community universally reviled him, but his books made just enough money to keep getting published.
What had caught me about Engelhart, though, what made me, in a way, adore him, was the fact that he truly believed he was the greatest writer in the world. Engelhart had an official website. Every once in a while he would release a video responding to his critics.
I watched his missives obsessively, often just before sitting down to review another one of his books. Sometimes I would try to hook Greg into watching the videos with me. I would crack open a bottle of wine and the two of us would huddle close to the glow of my computer screen and listen to the words of Engelhart. Engelhart looked like an aging soccer hooligan. His grey hair was buzzed short, his nose was wide and bulbous, and his eyes were narrowed in a perpetual squint. The videos nearly always started the same way: Engelhart in a t-shirt, sitting behind his desk in an anonymous low-rent office, staring seriously into the camera.
“I am the only genius in the whole fucking book business,” said Engelhart. He paused and laced his fingers together. It was a surprisingly delicate gesture for a man of his appearance and vocabulary. “My upcoming book, The Shadow of The Rose of Fate, is a fantasy-romance-mystery. It’s going to be way better than all of the social-critic bullshit that comes out every week.”
“Phillip Roth?” said Engelhart, “Don DeLillo? Fucking retards.”
“My God,” I said, squeezing Greg’s arm. “My God. This man is absolutely insane.”
“Why does this make you so happy?” asked Greg. “It’s sad.”
“Sad? Sad? This man believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he is the best at what he does. He’s happy.” I would give a lot to be that delusional.
-
After Greg left for work, I sat at the kitchen table for a while, turning the letter over and over in my hands. I put the letter down and gnawed at one of my fingernails. I picked up the phone and dialed the number printed in bold type at the bottom of the letter.
“Hello?” said the voice on the other end of the line.
“Hi,” I said, “Is this Ari Engelhart?”
“No no no,” said the voice, “I’m Ari’s agent.”
“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “This is Jenny Akulowski. I got your invitation. The boxing invitation.”
“Ah, yes,” said the agent. “Jenny Jenny Jenny. Ari’s read almost all of your reviews. He’s going to be in your neck of the woods in two weeks as part of his promotional tour for The Shadow of the Rose of Fate, and he’d love to discuss some of your opinions with you.”
I twisted the phone cord around my wrist. “A discussion?” I said. I had to admit, the thought of a discussion with Engelhart made my blood move a little faster.
“Yeah. A casual discussion. In the ring. You know, just a few rounds between friends.”
“You’re kidding, right?” I said, “This is just some sort of publicity stunt?”
“Listen,” said the agent, “meet us at Waterloo Park at 3 o’clock, two weeks from now. By the picnic pavilion. We’ll work everything out.”
“Well,” I said, “I don’t –“
“Great. Wonderful. Fantastic. See you there, kid,” said the agent, and hung up.
-
Greg was less than thrilled about the boxing match. That evening he stood with his back to me, facing the stove, sautéing beet greens. I sat at the kitchen table. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew exactly what it would look like. I was intimate with that particular face, warm concern seasoned with subtle disapproval. Greg tossed some minced garlic into the pan and the scent bloomed in the kitchen air. I sneezed and made an attempt.
“Sweetheart,” I said. It still sounded false. I couldn’t help but hear the word as if it came from someone else’s mouth. I cleared my throat. “Sweetheart,” I began again. “I’m not really going to box him. That would be ridiculous. I just want to meet the guy in person.”
“Why?” asked Greg, scraping the greens around the pan. “I thought you hated him.”
I rapped my short fingernails one by one against the surface of the linoleum table. “It’s complicated. I have love-hate feelings towards Ari Engelhart. I hate his work, but I love that he exists.”
“I still don’t understand – ”
“Listen, I’m probably never going to get to meet anyone actually great. Thomas Pynchon? Forget about it. He doesn’t meet with anybody. Those guys that Engelhart hates so much? Roth? DeLillo? Neither of them would ever give me the time of day. But I can at least meet the very worst writer of our time. The very worst. I feel like that’s almost as good.”
He sighed loudly, shoulders dropping forward.
“Don’t be mad. C’mon. C’mere,” I said.
Greg did. He crossed the kitchen in a few long strides and bent to put his arms around me. He buried his nose in my neck. He paused, sniffed.
“Are you smoking again?” he said.
-
They day I was due to meet Ari Engelhart, I had Greg drop me off downtown before he headed to work. I wore a secondhand suit that almost fit me. I carried a small briefcase that contained some of my notes and a digital tape recorder. I had a flickering hope that, if I played my cards right, I could manage an interview. I had most of the day to kill, so I wandered in and out of coffee shops and tried to work out what I would say to Engelhart. I thought about how I should set my face. Staring straight at him or looking up through my eyelashes? Smile with teeth bared or lips closed? When 3 o’clock rolled up on my silver men’s watch I tasted metallic panic on the back of my tongue. I thought about how little I actually knew about Engelhart, besides the fact that he was a terrible writer and a delusional, possibly dangerous human being.
When I arrived at Waterloo park I relaxed. The artificially green slopes of the park cooled my eyes, a world away from the grey scrub I usually stared at through the window over my desk. When I got to the picnic pavilion I stopped dead in my tracks. All the little red hairs on the back of my neck stood up and then fell back down again.
A small ring had been set up on the grass: a rope strained tight between plastic posts. A curious crowd waited around the ring. Ari Engelhart sat on a stool in one corner of the makeshift ring. His hands hung heavy and loose in their padded gloves. He looked more simian than usual.
“I think,” I said quietly to myself, “that I may have made a mistake.” I turned to leave, but a small man in a suit much nicer than mine grabbed my hand and started pumping it up and down mechanically.
“Ah, Jenny Jenny Jenny,” said the man. “Jenny Akulowski. I recognize you from that little portrait by your reviews on the Chronicle website. Glad you could make it. I’m Ari’s agent.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.
“No no no,” said the man, shaking his head and never letting his smile slip. “You already agreed to do this.” He wouldn’t let go of my hand.
“I don’t think I did, actually,” I said. The agent’s eyes glittered up at me. He reminded me of a stoat. “Besides, I’m a nobody. You don’t want to box me. Go box The New York Times.”
“The New York Times never responded to our invitation,” said the agent.
“I don’t know how to box,” I said.
“Well,” said the agent, “You had two weeks to prepare.” He had an iron grip on my arm and was steering me into the makeshift ring. The small crowd noticed. A few people clapped. I couldn’t back out now, now that somebody had gone and clapped for me.
Then I was in the ring and the agent was wrapping tape around my hands. I slipped my fist into the heavy gloves and popped the mouth guard between my teeth.
I stood in the middle of the ring in front of Engelhart while the agent clambered out between the ropes. Engelhart was a good foot taller than me and at least 50 pounds heavier. My brain was moving and moving but I couldn’t think of anything. “Hello,” I tried to say, but the mouthpiece swallowed my words. I felt heavy with inevitability; I didn’t know how I could even manage to raise my glove. I tried to drum up enough anger for my body to defend itself with. I stared up at Engelhart. His hooligan’s face was serious and expressionless. I was struck by how small and flat his eyes were. How stupid he looked. I wondered how much he made in a year. I ground my teeth against the mouth guard. If I had been holding a lit cigarette I would have stubbed it out on his chest.
The agent smiled at me from outside of the ring and rang a small bell.
I swung wildly and managed to hit him in the chest. It was like banging my fist into a bag of wet cement. Engelhart’s first punch landed on my chin and snapped my jaw hard around my mouthpiece. I was reminded of the fact that I didn’t actually know how to box. I could kick, knee, elbow, and bite, but I had never learned how to throw a respectable punch. I wheeled about, dazed, and the second punch connected solidly with the side of my skull.
Something, I thought as my eyes rolled back, Something has been knocked loose.
When I came to a minute later Engelhart had one meaty hand around my wrist and was hoisting me to my feet.
I made a small gurgling noise around the mouthpiece. It took me a few seconds to remember that I was in a boxing ring with Ari Engelhart. Engelhart’s other hand was thumping me hard on the back. It was only when I saw his broad smile that I realized this wasn’t another attack
“That was great. That was so great. You’re great,” said Engelhart. “You’ve got way more balls than all those other douchebags. You’re one of the good ones.”
I stared to laugh and nearly choked on my mouthpiece. I spat it out into the grass.
“Ready for another round?” said Engelhart. I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. His face had a very limited range of expression.
“I cede,” I said.
“What?” said Engelhart.
“I forfeit,” I said. “I give up.”
Engelhart nodded and gave a thumbs up to his agent. The agent got up on one of the stools and said to the small crowd, “And the winner is… Ari Engelhart!”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, “You can’t win. I lost, sure, but you can’t win. This has nothing to do with literature. It doesn’t make your books any better.”
But Engelhart just continued to smile at me and gave me one last, gentler pat on the back. “You and me, we should get some drinks after this,” he said. Engelhart, beatific, knew something I didn’t.
“No,” I said again, but Engelhart had already raised our clasped hands high over our heads and was turning to face the flash of a camera.
———-
This is an older story, written in the winter of 2008. It centers around Jenny and Greg. They’re also the subject of “The Townies“, and they make a brief, unnamed appearance in “Nova“. Apparently I just can’t leave those two alone.
At some point I need to properly edit those three stories so that they’re all in the right continuity with each other. Goodness. I have a continuity.
But if Grant Morrison taught me anything, it’s that continuities are meant to be broken. Maybe the next installment will involve Jenny and Greg confronting me in my apartment while I admit that I make bad things happen to them because I’m still sad that my parrot died. And then I’ll fix their lives for them with my author-god powers. (Dear reader, this is only funny if you’ve read Grant Morrison’s run on Animal Man.)
I think about Grant Morrison a lot. He appeared to me in a vision once, and ever since then has been canonized in my collection of personal saints. One day I’ll write him a letter about it. But I’m getting off topic.
A future draft of “Knock Down Drag Out” might include an end scene in which Jenny actually goes out for drinks with Ari and his agent. That could be interesting.
Ari Engelhart, if you’re interested, is a sort of Uwe Boll fictionally transposed onto the world of books. You haven’t heard of Uwe Boll? Well, many of the things Engelhart says are mashed up Uwe Boll quotes. And, yes, Uwe Boll challenged his critics to a boxing match. And won.
You’ve got to admire that. Even though he made In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.
I’ve been getting a lot of responses to the “Goodbye, Invisible Man” draft I posted last weekend. A lot. On this site, via e-mail, and in person. They’ve been overwhelmingly positive. I’ve actually been quite touched by the intensity of people’s reaction to the piece. If the feedback I’ve gotten is any indication, this may be the strongest thing I’ve ever written.
I know who’s to thank. You were a muse and a half, boy-o.
This semester will consist of much more writing than editing. So the polished forms of most of these drafts won’t be done until the spring. In the meantime, though, I’m producing a lot of new material.
I’m working on “Win”, a nasty little story that’s a sister to “Goodbye, Invisible Man”. It also involves love, failure, sex, and killing the past, but it treats these subjects very differently. There is nothing fantastic in “Win”, there are only people. I won’t have a new draft ready by this weekend, but I will probably post an older story that hasn’t seen the light of the internet yet. It’s called “Knock Down Drag Out”.
Here’s some homework for you if you have any interest in writing and/or Dostoevsky. Go get a book called The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii. Skip to the last chapter. Read Gary Saul Morson’s “Reading Dostoevskii”. Start with the discussion of presentness versus structure, stick around for the stuff about process writing and intentionality. Brilliant. It hit on all the fiction/non-fiction tension I’ve been feeling lately.
Thank you, you’ve been a lovely audience. Here, have a functional index.
