Universe 11 - [Anthology] Read online

  ~ * ~

  It had started to rain. I put down the last page of Greta, leaned over the desk, and opened my tiny bedroom’s one window. Outside it was dark, with smeared blurs of light shining through the rain, and soft splats as the drops hit the screen. Drifting in were those summer-night smells that even New York can’t totally obliterate: damp earth, wet dust from the screen, and, improbably, roses.

  Were there roses in the minipark across the street? Suddenly it seemed very important to remember. I leaned my forehead against the dark wet screen, its slippery wire squares reminding me of Ms. Tidwell’s hairnet, and tried to picture the park. One chipped bench, one maple tree protected by a ten-foot whitewashed cage, one litter basket overflowing with objects not bearing close examination, and one flower bed. Were there roses in the flower bed? And if so, were they red or pink or white or yellow? Long-stemmed or clustered on low bushes? Straggly or well pruned? Buds or already blowsy, their ripeness turning messy, dropping silky petals like specks of blood?

  I couldn’t see the roses. All I could see was the child protagonist of Greta.

  It was a fabulous book. Literally: a book fabled, beyond human expectations, removed from the mundane not because of what happened in it, but because of what it made of what happened. Huckleberry Finn without the leaky ending. A female Holden Caulfield brought with power and poignancy into the 1990’s. Oliver Twist without bathos. Johannsen had painted Greta’s rite of passage with the uncompromising harshness of a Faulkner, the detail of a Colette, the controlled compassion of a Steinbeck.

  So many literary allusions. But they weren’t quite right, after all. It wasn’t those other masters Johannsen had echoed, it was me, my own deepest resonances in the subconscious, or wherever the hell they’re supposed to be kept now, so that as I read, little shocks of recognition and discovery flashed between me and the badly typed pages. More: Greta was the universal childhood experience, being a stranger in a harsh and unfamiliar adult land, lifted to a peak so lucid and sharp that it might have been the prototype for Twain, Dickens, et al, instead of their culmination.

  I saw that I had set the last page crookedly on top of the rest. I straightened it carefully, taking a long time to get it exactly right, all four corners perfectly aligned to slide the manuscript into its cardboard box. There was a stain on one corner of the box; it looked like jelly. Meticulously I rubbed it with a tissue, then an eraser, until the smear was gone and the rubbed nap all lay in the same direction.

  Then there was nothing else to do.

  Greta had done it all.

  I undressed, hanging my jumpsuit with mathematical care. Shoulders equidistant on the hanger, boots lined up at right angles, toothbrush plumb-line vertical in its holder. The hairbrush free of all pulled strands. Everything necessary attended to. The key to the locked drawer holding my manuscript made a tinny, gurgling sound as I flushed it down the toilet, but it didn’t clog the pipe.

  I went to bed.

  At a third-rate c-aud publisher, art is for making money. But now I thought about McGratty and the little girls he had entertained so well. I thought about Garber dying, and Ida Tidwell smiling so much over so little. I thought about Susan and about Nellie Kay Armbruster, both glaring at me as if we belonged to different species, with no possible hope of first contact. I thought about Johannsen, composing Greta out of whatever universal vision blazed from him through G-M’s aging equipment to his c-aud, and back again. And again. And I thought about Mummy-sweet. All that pain, then: wasted. Never used; never transformed; never, dammit, justified. Not by me.

  The rain stopped. The sliding sounds of traffic on wet pavement drifted in the dark window. A dog barked.

  So what do you do, when somebody else builds the pyramids where you needed to put up your bark hut? First you think, a dead dream, and then you tell yourself that the least you can do is avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés. Then you realize that even telling yourself that is a cliché, and so is the realization that it is. Then you plod round and round the same tired track, trying not to see what’s there—or, rather, trying to see what’s not there, the unique deep contribution that all of a sudden is now neither unique nor necessary, nor even, by comparison, very deep. You listen to traffic. You listen to your own heartbeat, and to those weird New York night sounds that are never identifiable but always familiar: thumps and hoots and blurred, distant wails from God-knows-what. You pick apart into bloody shreds everything that ever happened to you, everything you’ve ever done, and finally you make yourself stop that because soggy self-pity won’t help, only survival-oriented tough-minded hard-nosed gut will help, kid, so stop ya blubberin’ and strap on that there gun. And then you tell yourself to avoid thinking in those damn tired clichés.

  Finally you roll over and sleep, because even the pyramids don’t change having to get up early to go to work, and fix your daughter’s breakfast, and stop at the bank to pay the utility. And sometime in the night the rain starts again, smelling of phantom roses.

  ~ * ~

  In the morning the pickets were back, treading an oval on the sidewalk. Seen up close, they were an odd lot: two kids with the single scalp-strip of curled hair that is the current fashion in parent-annoyance, an intense academic type wearing middle-age badly, a woman dressed in nurse uniform, cap, and stethoscope, and an old spoonhead I had seen last week carrying a sandwich board for Harvey’s Eats. They carried a new collection of signs:

  HUMAN BOOKS FOR HUMAN HEARTS

  SAVE OUR CHILDREN’S MINDS

  A C-AUD IS A COMPUTER’S BAWD

  (That was the academic.)

  IS NOTHING SACRID?

  NO SEA TO SHINING C-AUD

  “‘Sacred’ is misspelled,” I said, to no one in particular. One of the kids squinted at me.

  “It should be s-a-c-r-e-d.”

  He scanned the signs until he saw the one I meant, carried by the spoonhead. I ducked into the building. No one tried to stop me, although the nurse gave me the pitying look of the elect for the damned.

  Garber wasn’t in his office. My desk was cluttered with the usual jetsam, all claiming to be important.

  The computer tech wanted payment for the last set of equipment repairs.

  The utility company regretted to inform us of a rate hike.

  Ms. Ida Tidwell had submitted another application for a free-lance c-aud. This one was for a book called Tiny Tina’s Lesson. Check enclosed, drawn on a savings bank.

  Matthew McGratty wanted to explore the possibility of renegotiating our contract. He had received this offer from a well-known publisher he didn’t feel at liberty to name. . . .

  I was staring at it all with profound disinterest when Garber came in. He entered quietly, gently, almost as if he were apologizing for something, or afraid of intruding on mourning. He looked terrible. His suit was even more rumpled than usual, his sunken blue eyes rimmed with purple shadows. I tensed, knowing he would discuss Greta, and bracing myself for—what? We had never talked directly about my writing. For unspoken pity, then. For penetrating looks and restrained curiosity. But instead Garber just laid a package on my desk.

  “Read this, Mary. Now. Please.” He didn’t look at me.

  “Garber, what—”

  “Please.”

  He turned and left, closing die door behind him. Gently.

  I opened the package. It was a manuscript, a photocopy, marked “To C. Jameson. Molloy Press. C-AUD 22, final taping.” The title was Floor of Heaven. I thought a moment, then located the title in The Merchant of Venice. The author was a name instantly recognizable, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a brilliant writer with the sort of reputation that even high school sophomores have heard of. I had reread her last book twice. What was she doing sending a manuscript to Garber, via Jameson? It made no sense.

  I began to read. Twenty pages in, I realized that, in the essentials that truly count, the characters and meaning and nuances of emotional and intellectual theme that make a book what it is, I knew the book already.
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  I had read it last night.

  ~ * ~

  Garber was sitting in his office, with the lights off. He’d pulled his chair over to the window and looped back the curtain, and he sat in the half-light with his hands folded on his belly, gazing out. It had started to drizzle. Far below, the corners of the pickets’ cardboard signs curled over on themselves like sea waves.

  I laid Floor of Heaven on his desk.

  “Collusion . . .” I said, the word trailing off into nothing. The author of Floor of Heaven was neither unscrupulous nor insane. No motive. More loudly I said, “A bad practical joke.” Garber didn’t answer, but I rushed on.

  “Of course, Garber. That’s all it is. Some arrested-development who’s willing to go to elaborate lengths to ... to scare Jameson!” Only, of course, Jameson wasn’t scared. “To make him look foolish, then. Utterly, ridiculously foolish, in print.”

  Garber smiled.

  “It happens all the time. Literary hoaxes. So much a part of publishing history that it’s . . . practically obligatory, every once in a while. Patriotic, even. That’s all it is.”

  Garber gestured out the window. “They’ll be ecstatic,” he said, smiling, still smiling, and I exploded.

  “Come on, Garber, one duplication doesn’t prove anything! Even random chance allows for some total improbabilities! If all the monkeys in the British Museum began typing—no, that’s not right, if all the monkeys in the world—”

  “No,” Garber said, his voice quiet against my shrillness. “No, one duplication doesn’t prove anything.”

  “—began typing all the books in—all the books in the British ... oh, hell, Garber.”

  “Yes,” Garber said. He was still smiling, a remote smile that made me uneasy. I looked away.

  “So what happens next?”

  The smile widened. “Jameson showed me his article. To be published next week. Quite a privilege, actually, considering who he is, and that when all this came up he thought my name was ‘Farber.’ It’s quite a story. About Plato.”

  “Plato?”

  “Plato.”

  “The ancient Greek Plato?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “How . . .” I almost had it, but it slipped my mind. A long time since college.

  “Jameson gave me a copy.” Garber opened his desk drawer, drew out a pile of paper, and pulled the third and fourth sheets. Sections were circled with thick, waxy red, and I knew that Garber must have marked it, not Jameson. Garber is probably the only company president in New York who keeps PreSchool Crayolas in his desk.

  “Just read that,” he said, still with the same casual, remote smile. “Go ahead, read it, skip the rest and start there.”

  Jameson was given to parenthetical clauses. His dense, twisty sentences snaked themselves at me from the page:

  But all these esoteric theories, fascinating sport though their intellectual gymnastics may provide, reduce in the end to a theory so old that it is embarrassing to realize by how many centuries we may have been anticipated. Two books, independently written, yet identical in character and incident and theme and, above all, in emotional impact, in the images evoked in that older brain that lies below the one usually concerned with words. Identical, and both brilliant, with the brilliance of a perfect object illuminated in firelight. And here it all comes together.

  We have always assumed human experience to be too varied for meaningful, exact duplication. We have always supposed that how an artist “handled” a theme— as though love, death, and whatever were so many unbroken colts—was more important than the theme itself. We have always supposed that a talented writer need give only a “fresh reworking” to an archetypal experience, and the result was a new and separate work of art.

  But what if we were wrong? What if the number of real, deep experiences open to man is actually small? Or, more accurately put, what if the number of resonances, of ways that seemingly varied experiences strike the human subconscious and set up answering echoes so that experience becomes meaningful, is small? And, furthermore, what if the multiplicity of presentations of these experiences, the endless boy-meets-then-loses-girl books and plays and poems from Romeo and Juliet to True Romances, were valued only because the isolated individual writer had no way to come closer to a complete rendering of what that complete archetypal ideal would feel like within the human brain?

  It was Plato who wrote that man stares eternally at a cave wall, with his back to reality. What we see, what we call reality, is only shadows cast on that wall, fire-lit shadows from the actual reality behind us. The shadows dance and nod and flit, some much sharper than others, as some books and plays and poems are sharper, closer to the bone. And sometimes these authors’ made-up lies about the same experience seem to cancel each other out—as shadows must if we view them from different angles.

  Romanticism. Naturalism. Realism. Epic heroism. Escapism. All our literature has, until now, been cast from a flickering fire—the imperfect glow of one artist’s mind, one artist’s fragmented perceptions of those archetypal experiences that make up human reality within the brain. The results have been fitfully brilliant, fitfully dim. Even Shakespeare is conceded to have shadowy, murky patches, though the very gloom may cast the comforting shades of ambiguity around his harsher truths and thus render them the more acceptable. But if a way could be found to build that fire higher, to build it to a steady brilliant heat that casts ever more steady and brilliant shadows, eventually those shadows will merge and overlap until they stand as sharply etched as the original, a virtual copy of the reality, unmistakable and complete. What has done so, of course, is the technology of the composing-audience, that bringing together of many minds to cast light from all angles on an experience, until the fragmented shadows from each overlap and are again whole, and all the racial and archetypal responses are cast cleanly on that cave wall, in their one universal form.

  How many such forms exist buried in the human mind? We don’t yet know, but if the virtual congruence of Greta and Floor of Heaven is any indication, the number may be more sharply limited than we formerly thought. Or wished.

  What this posits about the definitive pinnacles of art is . . .

  “ ‘Fragmented shadows’ is lousy,” I said, too loudly.

  “What?” Garber said.

  ‘“Fragmented shadows.’ On the fourth page. It’s a lousy image. You can’t fragment a shadow. It’s a mixed metaphor. Or something.”

  “I’ll tell him you said so.”

  I knelt on the floor next to his chair and put my arms around him. “We’ve got lots of time, though, Garber. It’s not as though G-M Press will be obsolete tomorrow. Finding these archetypal works, or whatever, will take time. Years.”

  “Yes.”

  “And anyway, now that I think about it, Jameson’s talking about the masterpieces, the heights of experience. All this probably won’t even apply to us at all! We’ll just keep on as we always have, turning out entertainment for children!”

  “Yes.”

  “We won’t really be that affected at all. Kids will always need variety, even if it’s ‘fragmented.’ They don’t care. It’s not as though G-M ever expected to produce a masterpiece, for chrissake.”

  Garber didn’t answer.

  “But maybe we just will, anyway!” I said, and heard my own desperate brightness, and tried not to wonder what Garber’s private dreams as a publisher had been. “And, in any case, there’s lots of time!”

  He looked at me steadily. The jolly elf was gone, the scatterbrained enthusiast was gone, the casual fatalist was gone. He was the Garber who had come to see me in the sanitarium, the Garber who’d taken me to boarding school on the train, the Garber who’d stripped me of all my old destructive defenses, and so also stripped himself.

  “I don’t have lots of time, Mary.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. There wasn’t anything to say.

  The shoulder of his jumpsuit felt rough against my cheek. I kept my arms around
him, and we watched the pickets walking below in the rain. A bus went by, and three prohibitively expensive taxis, and a pair of kids who probably should have been in school. They wore yellow rainsuits and walked through every puddle, splashing and stamping. From what I could see at this distance, they never looked at the pickets at all. But from this distance, I couldn’t see much.

  Garber stood up, shook his head vigorously from side to side, and grinned.

  “So what’s this about more deathless prose from the pen of Ida Tidwell?”

  I got to my feet. “You won’t believe it, Garber; you just won’t believe it. It’s for this incredibly sappy proposal—”

  I managed to remove the manuscripts of both Greta and Floor of Heaven from the desk without actually looking at either of them. Then those of us who were not scaling the definitive pinnacles of art went back to work.