Mortals

So what he had before him was Rex’s desperate attempts to achieve wit, and then what, then use it as a hammer to smash the stale cake of custom plus the frozen lake within and all of that, all of that wrongness, Wrongness. But Rex was not the soul of wit. Twice he had gotten his column suspended because his bons mots had given offense to women, in one case when he’d referred to them as the leaky darlings, which alluded tastelessly to the fact that they menstruate and are sentimental and prone to weeping, and then in another case when he’d called them the Cleft Sex. He was reckless. Rex had been writing for gay publications, and Ray could see that he’d been attempting to carry off a sort of parody of old-hat gay attitudes toward women, but he’d misjudged his readers and the power the new literalism had over them. In the same spirit he had defined men as the Apposite Sex, but he hadn’t gotten in hot water over that. Probably people had just found it baffling and gone quickly past.

I am not your editor, Ray wanted to say. But that was going to be the plot. He was designated to boil this froth down into a bouillon cube of near greatness, even if there was only enough for a chapbook of the best thrusts and gems, to be given away, distributed somehow to some population he had no idea how to identify or reach. But he had to, because Rex wasn’t well. There was strange news coming, bad news, and there was nothing he could do about it. This was what he could do. This was his fate, part of it. It was hard to credit.

An unwelcome sound came from the front seat, followed by a few low-spoken unintelligible words of, conceivably, apology. Barely audible mutterings could be called mutterances, why not? Suppose I had turned my mind to producing glittering nothings like Rex’s, what would I have? he thought.

He plucked out another sheet at random and there was more synchronicity for him, annoyingly. Entry 308 was death-related. Or more precisely, it was life-residue-related. He ought to stop the random selection business for a while. He was toying with some imaginary thing. It wasn’t good.

308. In Memoriam: A Report

I have to speak at her memorial service and what kills me is I can’t mention the one thing about her that was genuinely remarkable. I went with her for about six months in the seventies and after that I didn’t see her for years, so it’s not that I know that much about her. But I’m a celebrity so they want me, so I don’t mind. I understand it. But what I’ve never told anybody and what was really the only interesting thing I know about her is this. She had a weird talent. You’re lying down with her watching television and you have one of those moments when your color set goes black and white for no reason. This was before cable so you have no one to call up about it. You fiddle with the set every way you can but nothing corrects it. You even twiddle the little hidden knobs on the back. But this is what she would do. We discovered it by accident. The first time it was more an expression of exasperation than anything else. But this is what she could do. She could spread her legs and buck her pelvis hard at the thing. She would pull up her nightgown and do it, and by the way she had no panties on. But when she gives a couple of hard bumps or grinds, whichever, the color comes back. She did this at least four times. There must have been a rational explanation but we never figured out what it was. Somehow maybe it was some delicate condition in the wiring in her building. But just pounding on the wall behind the set did nothing. We laughed hysterically. I don’t know what I’m going to say about her unless I make something up.

There you have nothing, he thought. He went back to working consecutively through the manuscript and immediately couldn’t believe his luck. There was an inclusion, something from Iris stuck in with his brother’s flotsam, something with her writing on it. This was Iris. This was the kind of thing she did.

It was a Xerox of a Peace Corps document headed INTERRACIAL EXPERIENCE ASSESSMENT FORM. Across the top of it Iris had written Do you know what you have to go through in order to get into the Peace Corps and get sent to an African country? Somebody at the embassy got hold of this and is passing it around. I love you, Ray. Iris.

You used to, he thought.

Interracial Experience Assessment Form—Page One

1. Recall your first significant interaction with a Black person. Describe the situation and your feelings at the time.

Answer: My first significant interaction with a Black person was when I was five and ran away from home with a friend my age and we went to the dock area, the harbor area, and a Negro dockworker gave us some of his lunch and called the police. My feelings were as follows. I felt relieved yet betrayed.

2. What was the strongest fear you developed as a child about interactions with Black persons? Estimate how strong that fear is today.

Answer: You might fall in love with a Negro and have children that would have a miserable life because neither race would accept them.

That fear is much less strong since we began doing all the questionnaires and games, by far.

At the bottom she had written Sorry I only have page one. Love again, Iris. He touched her name in both the places she had signed it.

Sleep was being coy. A lot of what he had to read he was finding vaguely agitating. To convert Strange News into a pillow book he was going to have to separate out and consolidate the longer paragraphic entries, which tended to consist of various micronarratives, subanecdotal most of them, illustrating some hilarious defect or other in the mental landscapes of everyone in the world except the author- observer. It took narrative to put Ray to sleep. Narrative was the syrup. It wasn’t the sheer dynamics of reading that did it. Poems, even, needed some narrative weight to work. The Conversation entries were dubious, from the narrative standpoint, judging by what he was finding in them so far.

19. Conversation

Two guys had been drinking together.

The slightly older of the two said, “My friend, I will confess something to you. My old friend, I find my children boring.”

“Me too.”

“So if we find our children boring, who is to blame, is it the peer culture, is it—”

“Nononono. I wasn’t saying my children are boring. I was agreeing with you about your children.”

“I see,” the older guy said.

Ray thought, Here is the problem: This is not a joke: It’s on the verge of being a joke but it doesn’t arrive. Rex had something, but he wanted to be more, to be brilliant. There was a roster of the brilliant and there was a roster of the nonbrilliant and there was one for the formerly considered brilliant. Every serious writer considered any appellation other than brilliant an insult. If the word appeared, glittering, somewhere in a review, then any objections the review contained surrounding the word were nullified. They turned to mist. A brilliant failure was just fine. He was prepared to salute anything brilliant he found in Strange News. He meant it. He would be happy about it. This was Rex’s attempt at a monument and he was willing to help, more willing than he had been. His feelings were changing. How serious the core of Strange News was remained a question, but that was all right. He pitied serious writers. The best that ninety-nine percent of them could hope for was a glancing appearance in a survey course at lengthening intervals. Even Milton was dropping to survey status more and more, even at the graduate level. It was true. And the next step down would be the collateral reading in a survey course, the books only the strivers got around to. I was a striver, a Striver, he thought. And then it would be down to a footnote in a title in the collateral list. And then what, some academic trivia game. And then nothing. It was possible for a writer’s creation to be of academic interest solely for whatever influences could be seen in it of prior writers, more brilliant writers. That was life, the literary life.

114. Untitled

X decided to stay home and pass the time by counting his feet.