time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. His teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow fluoride multivitamins and in the meantime let's concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it. Must finish. Can't die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn't she? I'm a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick. He saw he'd inverted two letters, which he's been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there's something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal mis-fingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he'd been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I'm between novels, he used to say, so I don't mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let's order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows.
Brita was packed and ready anytime. She went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee. She sat at the table and looked around the kitchen. A young woman walked in and softly said Hi. She leaned on the table, using a hand to balance, her left foot raised vaguely off the floor. She had long straight hair, light brown, and a slightly jutting mouth that made her look remorseless. 'How many pictures did you take?'
'We talked and worked a while and then I shot some more rolls when we ran out of conversation and then some more after that.'
'Would you call this an average day or going into the realm of horrid excess?'
'What's your name?'
'Karen.'
'And you live here.'
'Scott and I.'
'I'll tell you the truth, Karen. I'm not interested in photography. I'm interested in writers.'
'Then why don't you stay home and read?'
She reached for a box of muffins on the countertop and put it down near Brita's coffee. Then she curled into a chair and played with a stray spoon. She wore a limp blouse over blue jeans and had the body lines of a teenager, the crooks and skews and smeariness, and a way of merging with furniture, a kind of draped indecision.
Brita said, 'I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.'
'Did you always know you wanted to be a photographer?'
'I read on planes, I read in laundromats. How old are you?'
'Twenty-four.'
'And you help out here.'
'Scott does most of it. He manages the expenses, the cash flow, he does taxes, he deals with the utilities, he answers all Bill's mail except the mentals, which we haughtily ignore lest they get encouraged. We share the cooking and shopping except he probably does more than I do. He does all the filing, the organizing of papers. I clean like a little scrub lady, which I don't half mind. I make believe I'm fat and walk with a waddle. We do the typing about fifty-fifty, with Scott doing the last spotless copy, and then we proofread together, which is probably our favorite time.'
'And you think it's a mistake, these pictures.'
'We love Bill, that's all.'
'And you hate me for leaving here with all that film.'
'It's just a feeling of there's something wrong. We have a life here that's carefully balanced. There's a lot of planning and thinking behind the way Bill lives and now there's a crack all of a sudden. What's it called, a fissure.'
The car pulled up, door opened, then closed. Karen tapped the bowl end of the spoon with her index finger, over and over, making the handle go up and down.
'What do you think of marriage for a professional woman?' she said.
'I'm divorced many years. He lives in Belgium. We don't talk at all.'
'Do you have children that are still torn up over the divorce so that everybody's tense around each other and you can see the resentment lurking far back in their eyes even after all this time?'
'Sorry, no.'
'I haven't known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?'
'Yes, I do.'
'Do people tell you they like your work? They come up to you at parties in New York and say, 'I just wanted to tell you.' Or, 'You don't know me but I just wanted.' Or, 'I really have to tell you this and I hope you'll forgive the intrusion.' Then you look at them and smile like shyly.'
Scott came in with groceries. He poured a cup of coffee and told the story of his journey out of nonbeing. How he started writing letters to Bill care of his publisher. He wrote nine or ten letters, ambitious and self-searching, filled with things a luckless boy wants to say to a writer whose work has moved him. He hadn't known he could summon these deep feelings or express them with reckless style and delight, certain cosmic words typed in caps and others spelled oddly to reveal second and third meanings. The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things. How he finally got one letter back, two lines, handwritten in a hurry, saying there is never time to respond properly but thanks for writing. How Scott took this as encouragement and wrote five more letters, intense and sweeping, the last of them saying that he was setting out to find Bill, that he needed to see and meet and talk to Bill, that the urge to make a journey in search of the man who wrote these books could no longer be contained. How Bill did not reply. And how Scott took this as encouragement because Bill could have written and said, Forget it, stay away, do not even remotely approach. He had the envelope Bill's note had come in, postmarked New York City, but Scott happened to know from reading a magazine piece about Lost Writers that Bill concealed his whereabouts by sending letters to his publisher for remailing.
'And so you hitchhiked.'
Yes. He set out thumbing rides at the edges of ripping interstates and the venture was so chancy it made him feel weightless, standing in the wind of rolling diesel rigs. He wore mirrored glasses and carried a timeless Eastern text and he told drivers he was setting out to find a famous writer. Some of them talked about famous people they wished they could meet and it was interesting how very few of these people were alive today. All the famous were either dead or used up. A pickup he was riding in caught fire just west of Fort Wayne and it seemed all right, it seemed appropriate, things were too vivid not to enter deeper states. He was elated, worked to a sensory howl, flying past the low stink of day-to-day. A driver had chest pains outside Toledo and Scott drove him to a hospital, feeling talkative, telling the man the plot of a movie he'd seen last week. The car handled well and he gained in being as he drove, cornering sweetly. I'm glad we had this chance to talk, he said, jogging alongside the gurney as attendants hustled the man into white light. Three days later he had a job in the mailroom at the house that published Bill Gray's books.
How he made friends. How he learned that the letters Bill sent in to be remailed came in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope addressed to the head of the mailroom, a friendly sleepy former IRA man named Joe Doheny, who
