'Sounds perfectly reasonable.'
'Are you losing interest? Because I sometimes don't realize the way a session becomes mine. I get very possessive at a certain point. I'm easy and agreeable on the edges of the operation. But at the heart, in the frame, it's mine.'
'I think I need these pictures more than you do. To break down the monolith I've built. I'm afraid to go anywhere, even the seedy diner in the nearest little crossroads town. I'm convinced the serious trackers are moving in with their mobile phones and zoom lenses. Once you choose this life, you understand what it's like to exist in a state of constant religious observance. There are no halfway measures. All the movements we make are ritual movements. Everything we do that isn't directly centered on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion. Scott works out the routes of simple trips I occasionally make, like doctor's visits. There are procedures for people coming to the house. Repairmen, deliverymen. It's an irrational way of life that has a powerful inner logic. The way religion takes over a life. The way disease takes over a life. There's a force that's totally independent of my conscious choices. And it's an angry grudging force. Maybe I don't want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain.
Leave me alone with it. Don't stare at me, don't ask me to sign copies of my books, don't point me out on the street, don't creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don't take my picture. I've paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I'm sick of it finally.'
He spoke quietly, looking away from her. He gave the impression he was learning these things for the first time, hearing them at last. How strange they sounded. He couldn't understand how any of it had happened, how a young man, inexperienced, wary of the machinery of gloss and distortion, protective of his work and very shy and slightly self-romanticizing, could find himself all these years later trapped in his own massive stillness.
'Are you fading at all?'
'No.'
'I forget how weary all this concentrated effort can make a person. I have no conscience when it comes to work. I expect the subject to be as single-minded as I am.'
'This isn't work for me.'
'We make pictures together after all.'
'Work is what I do to feel bad.'
'Why should anyone feel good?'
'Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn't been a moment since those days when I've felt nearly so good.'
He had a smoker's laugh, cracked and graveled.
'I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I've been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There's no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it's completely spontaneous. It's the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.'
'I don't know, Bill.'
'I don't know, either.'
'It sounds like mental illness to me.'
He laughed again. She took pictures of him laughing until the roll was finished. Then she loaded the camera and moved him away from the quartz lamp and started shooting again, using window light now.
'Incidentally. I bring a message from Charles Everson.'
Bill hitched up his pants. He seemed to look past her, frisking himself for signs of cigarettes.
'I ran into him at a publishing dinner somewhere. He asked how my work was going. I told him I'd probably be seeing you.'
'No reason you shouldn't mention it.'
'I hope it's all right.'
'The pictures will be out one day.'
'Actually the only message I bring is that Charles wants to talk to you. He wouldn't tell me what it's all about. I told him to write you a letter. He said you don't read your mail.'
'Scott reads my mail.'
'He said that what he had to tell you couldn't be seen or heard by anyone else. Far too delicate. He also said he used to be your editor and good, good friend. And he said it was distressing not to be able to get in touch with you directly.'
Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.
'How's old Charlie then?'
'The same. Soft, pink and happy.'
'Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there's always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement.
They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state.'
'He told me you'd say something like that.'
'And you waited to tell me about him. Didn't want to spring it on me prematurely.'
'I wanted my pictures first. I didn't know how you'd react to news from out there.'
He struck the match and then forgot it.
'Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they're part of an august tradition.'
'He simply wants you to call him. He says it's a matter of some importance.'
He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.
'The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.'
'You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it's just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn't this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you've been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it's not so lost. What you say you're writing toward, isn't this what people see in your work?'
'I only know what I see. Or what I don't see.'
'Tell me what that means.'
He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.
'Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I've worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I've forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I've lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I've let good enough be good enough. This is someone else's book. It feels all forced and wrong. I've tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I'm sitting on a book that's dead.'
'Does Scott know you feel this way?'
'Scott. Scott's way ahead of me. Scott doesn't want me to publish.'
'But this is completely crazy.'
'No, it's not. There's something to be said.'
'When will you finish?'
'Finish. I'm finished. The book's been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating.'
'Show someone else.'
